Department of English and American Studies English Language And
Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature Rudolf Hecl Twin Peaks: Revolution on TV Master ’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. 2009
1 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. ...... Author’s signature 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr., for his kind help, support and valuable advice. Also, I would like to thank Leesa Wheatley for proofreading my thesis.
3 Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 5 01. Lynch ...... 7 02. Twin Peaks ...... 25 General facts about Twin Peaks ...... 25 Auteur Theory vs. Collaborators (Why Lynch’s Twin Peaks ?) ...... 27 Plot ...... 30 Characters ...... 38 Motifs and Themes ...... 43 03. Cinema ...... 51 Sound ...... 52 Image ...... 54 Mood ...... 56 Blue Velvet ...... 59 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me ...... 64 04. Television and Media ...... 69 Genre ...... 69 Legacy ...... 71 Media ...... 74 Conclusion ...... 77 Bibliography ...... 79
4 Introduction
Twin Peaks is an ABC television series first aired in 1990 and 1991. It is associated, above all, with the well known filmmaker David Lynch. Owing to this connection, as well as other factors, Twin Peaks is generally regarded as a television milestone and a series that changed TV. The objective of this thesis is to present the factors that contributed to Twin Peaks’ status as a revolutionary television show. It introduces both David Lynch and his only successful work for television. From several angles, it seeks to analyze why and in what respects Twin Peaks is considered pioneering.
The first chapter is about David Lynch, the man behind Twin Peaks . Although
Lynch was neither the only author (he co created the series with Mark Frost, and several other authors participated in writing the screenplay) nor the only director (he only directed two pilots and four more episodes, the remaining twenty four episodes were directed by other people, usually chosen by him), he was the man whose influence was decisive in making Twin Peaks novel. The chapter sums up Lynch’s filmography, adds basic biographical information and mentions connections with the series.
The following chapter focuses on Twin Peaks itself. It gives an overview of the series – main plotlines and characters, themes and motifs – and tries to show what was new and unusual on the television screen in this respect.
Chapter 3 deals with Twin Peaks’ affiliation with cinema. It observes cinematic techniques used in the series which are not very common on the small screen, as well as comparing Twin Peaks with Lynch’s films from the same period of time, in particular
Blue Velvet preceding the series and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me , a prequel to the
TV show shot after the series was stopped by ABC.
5 The final chapter, entitled “Television and Media,” adds a few points regarding
Twin Peaks that should be mentioned, as they are of importance especially as far as the reception of the series is concerned. The problematic genre classification and the legacy of the series are discussed, along with the crucial role of the media in both promoting
Twin Peaks and later contributing to its decline.
6 01. Lynch
When the words Twin Peaks are uttered, the name of David Lynch immediately springs to the mind of every person at least averagely familiar with television, cinema and popular culture. Although he is far from being the only person behind the series, he is arguably the most important one (and definitely the most famous one). Who is this man, who is generally regarded as ‘weird’ and ‘quirky’ – synonyms that are so often attributed to Twin Peaks as well? What’s so special about him? Answering these questions helps us understand what is so special about Twin Peaks .1
However bizarre a personality David Lynch may be, one thing is absolutely clear: he is a ‘cult’ director. The definition of cult is very problematic, and there is no consensus as to what exactly it means, but Lynch is a cult artist without a doubt. If cult films require “controversy, in arguments over quality, themes, talent and other matters”
2 (ARBEIT 7), if they are “special films that elicit a fiery passion in moviegoers long after initial releases” (ARBEIT 8), if they “[lack] form, and so can be endlessly deformed and put out of joint” (ARBEIT 11), if cult is “art ‘from the margins and extremes’” or if cult directors are “such artists who developed an original visual or narrative style, populated their works with complex characters, and secured a sufficient degree of authorial control over their output” (ARBEIT 17), David Lynch and his films fit all these definitions. A cult director from the very beginning of his career, 3 Lynch managed to attract media and public attention in the early 1980s, but above all in 1986, when Blue Velvet was released. The Internet Movie Database quotes the tagline from the US Laserdisc release
1 Unless stated otherwise, all the facts and dates in this chapter concerning Lynch’s filmography are taken from The Internet Movie Database (IMD B); all the biographical information is from FISCHER . 2 In his essay, Marcel Arbeit quotes or paraphrases definitions of cult by various scholars. 3 His debut Eraserhead is commonly referred to as a cult movie: e.g. “the cult item Eraserhead ” (THOMSON and BORDWELL 720) 7 of Blue Velvet : “The Most Talked About Film of the Decade” (IMD B). His next major work for the screen – putting aside Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the
Brokenhearted (1990), which was a “video production of live theatrical performance”
(HUGHES 98) – was Twin Peaks . The fact that Lynch, a director parading the dark side of human psyche in his films, was about to work for television, a medium not in the least as liberal as cinema and very much under the control of censors, caused a lot of excitement. The series was a sensation even before it was first screened, largely thanks to Lynch’s reputation. But to introduce David Lynch, it would probably be better to start with a brief overview of his biography and his oeuvre .
David Lynch was born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana. Apart from one year in
North Carolina, Lynch spent his childhood in the north west of the United States: in
Montana, Washington and Idaho. This region left a deep impression on his mind. It is not a coincidence that the fictitious town, Twin Peaks, is located in Washington state, and that originally the series was supposed to be called Northwest Passage (FISCHER
148). Later Lynch’s family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. David’s education is very concisely summarized in International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers – [Vol.] 2,
Directors : “Educated at High School in Alexandria, Virginia; Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Art, Philadelphia; American Film Institute Centre for Advanced Studies, studying under Frank Daniel, 1970” (NEWMAN 537). Indeed, David Lynch started as a painter and only got to film during his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He felt paintings were too static; he wished they could move and make sounds (HUGHES 5).
The result was a one minute colour animation Six Figures Getting Sick in 1966
(according to IMD B and FISCHER ; in 1967 according to HUGHES ). “The most important legacy of Six Figures Getting Sick was that it prompted a wealthy artist, H. Barton
Wasserman, to order a similar ‘moving painting’ that he could project at home any time
8 he felt like it. Lynch did not wait to be asked Twice. The Alphabet was the result”
(HUGHES 6). In turn, The Alphabet (1968), a film clip starring his then wife Peggy, secured the young artist a grant from the American Film Institute (AFI), which enabled him to shoot The Grandmother (1970). 4 After this thirty four minutes long 16mm film, which was well received at several festivals, Lynch left Philadelphia and moved to Los
Angeles, where he started to study at the AFI Center for Advanced Film Studies. The filmmaker was born, but the fact that at heart Lynch is a painter is one of the factors that account for his peculiar style. Lynch’s style is highly visual: many images in his films are exceptionally powerful. However, it must be said that it is very often the sound that accompanies them that makes the images so impressive. Lynch is famous for meticulous work with sound. In fact, the balance between these two elements – image and sound – is an inherent part of ‘Lynchian’ style.
In the early seventies, the fledgling filmmaker’s style was yet to be developed.
One characteristic feature, however, appears right in his very first regular movie,
Eraserhead (1977): films by David Lynch are often quite intangible and multiple explanations are possible. Some of them have a clear frame story, but even these usually contain a few images or scenes that do not exactly fit in and that are confusing (the concept of ‘something not fitting in’ is, by the way, very ‘Lynchian,’ and frequent examples are to be found in Twin Peaks too); some of them, starting with Eraserhead and ending with Inland Empire (2006) – his latest feature to date, are a bewildering mash of scenes, images, noises and sounds more pretending to have a frame story than actually having one. From a different point of view, Lynch’s films are open to all sorts of interpretations. On the one hand, the ungraspability discourages many movie fans 4 Every Czech Lynch fan must be proud to read Kim Newman’s remark that his first films Alphabet and The Grandmother are “[Š]vankmajer style shorts” (NEWMAN 539). Besides, to mention another ‘Czech Connection,’ at the Center for Advanced Film Studies Lynch studied under Frank/František Daniel, who was born in Kolín in 1926 and who, for instance, wrote the screenplay for Zdeněk Podskalský’s 1959 film Kam čert nemůže (IMD B). 9 who want to watch a film with a story that is comprehensible (see Isabella Rossellini’s comment on Blue Velvet below); on the other hand, this very quality of Lynch’s movies makes them enticing to cinéphiles and very popular with film scholars. In short, if there are fans who watch Lynch’s films and want to find out what David Lynch meant by them, they are more than likely to fail. But exactly this vagueness and unexplainability and the necessity of a subjective response from the viewers is Lynch’s artistic goal and a part of the game he plays with them.
The shooting of Eraserhead started in 1972 (FISCHER 49), but the film was not premiered until 1977. The main reason for this delay was the lack of money: when the young director spent everything he got from the AFI, it was very difficult to get the necessary finance to finish the movie, but in the end he managed with the help from his friends and relatives who lent him money (RODENKIRCHEN 262). The film tells the story of Henry Spencer, an alienated printer who lives in an extremely gloomy house in an extremely gloomy city. At the beginning of the movie, he is invited to dinner by Mary, a girl he had an affair with. At Mary’s place he learns that he and Mary have a baby. The baby is a monster – it looks like an alien (it has a head of a reptile or dinosaur). Henry and Mary start to live together, but Mary cannot stand the baby’s constant crying and leaves. In the end, Henry kills the baby; it is not quite clear whether he does it deliberately or not. So much for the main line of the story. But there are others. The
“Man in the Planet” appears a few times operating a lever (in Henry’s head?). The
“Lady in the Radiator,” a dream vision, dances and sings on a stage apparently outside this world (“in Heaven” as it is implied in the lyrics of the only song she sings?).
Strange worms or embryos come in the post or fall from Mary in her sleep. There is also the “Beautiful Girl Across the Hall,” Henry’s neighbour, who spends a night with him.
The title Eraserhead refers to a surreal scene, in which Henry is in the world behind the
10 radiator when suddenly his head falls off, and he grows a head similar to that of his baby. The fallen off head falls to the middle of the street, it is picked up by a boy, carried to a factory and used as a material for pencil erasers.
If any of Lynch’s films are disturbing and make you feel uncomfortable, it is
Eraserhead . Later films such as Lost Highway , Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire may be equally or perhaps even more confusing as far as the plot is concerned, but they take place in ‘normal’ settings, in our everyday reality (the obvious exception being
Dune , which is a science fiction movie). As opposed to that, the world of Eraserhead is nightmarish; in its mood it resembles a post apocalyptic movie: the hero seems to be one of only a few people living in a barren world. The film is shot in black and white; it is only after ten minutes that someone speaks for the first time, and dialogues are generally very scarce. The few people who appear in the movie act like puppets or caricatures; everything is empty and bleak. In many ways Eraserhead is reminiscent of
German Expressionism of the 1920s. The connection with Expressionism is emphasized by the resemblances to Kafka’s The Trial (published posthumously in 1925). It is not only the dismal atmosphere of the whole work, but also, for example, Henry’s neighbour, the “Beautiful Girl Across the Hall,” who brings to mind Fräulein Bürstner,
Josef K.’s attractive neighbour. Lynch says that he has a feeling that Kafka could be his brother, and he admires his work (FISCHER 265), so it is quite possible that the
“Beautiful Girl Across the Hall” is inspired by the Prague writer. I have touched upon the importance of sound in Lynch’s motion pictures; the dreary atmosphere of
5 Eraserhead is to a great extent induced by omnipresent noises (RODENKIRCHEN 262).
There are not many direct connections between Eraserhead and Twin Peaks , apart from the fact that Lynch started putting together a team of people who would later 5 “Značný podíl na tísnivé atmosféře mají stále přítomné zvuky; zvukové rovině dominuje rachot neviditelných vlaků, bublání a syčení strojů a neustálý vřískot dítěte, které ojedinělým dialogům propůjčují rovněž podobu šumu” (RODENKIRCHEN 262). 11 co operate with him to varying degrees. In the series, Charlotte Stewart, who played
Mary X in Eraserhead , appears in a minor role, and Catherine Coulson, who worked as assistant to the director during the making of Eraserhead , plays the part of the Log
Lady. 6 The most important, however, was the collaboration between David Lynch and
Jack Nance (Henry Spencer in Eraserhead ), who had a role in all Lynch’s films, with the exception of The Elephant Man (which was shot in England) and Twin Peaks: Fire
Walk with Me (his scenes were not used in the final cut), until his death in 1996; his last appearance was in Lost Highway , which was finished and released in 1997. In Twin
Peaks he plays Pete Martell, and symbolically it is him – the lead in Lynch’s first feature film – who says the first words in the series and who discovers Laura Palmer’s dead body. 7 It also seems that the idea of the Black Lodge (the Red Room) 8 in Twin
Peaks had been in Lynch’s mind since Eraserhead : the ground floor in Henry’s house has the same black and white zigzag pattern as the floor in the Red Room; the curtains are around the stage in the world behind the radiator. Lynch even wanted to use a sentence in back talk in his debut, but in the end he dismissed the idea (ASTIC 47).
Thanks to Ben Barenholtz (“New York’s prominent underground film distributor”), Eraserhead became a “midnight movie:” “[s]lowly but surely, Eraserhead began to earn a cult following of its own [...]” (HUGHES 30). After Eraserhead , Lynch was labelled the greatest unknown director in the world (FISCHER 66). When Mel
Brooks was looking for a director to make The Elephant Man , David Lynch was recommended to him. Brooks saw Eraserhead , liked it and hired him.
6 An old lady who lives in a log cabin in the woods near Twin Peaks. She cradles a log all the time; hence the name. The series will be introduced in the next chapter; allusions to the series in this chapter will be shortly explained in footnotes. 7 Laura Palmer is a high school girl, whose murder opens Twin Peaks . 8 A mysterious dream place with red curtains instead of walls and a black and white zigzag pattern on the floor. 12 Even though The Elephant Man (1980) counts as one of the less ‘weird’ films by David Lynch, it confirmed the director’s penchant for outcasts and unusual people and things. Again, shot in black and white, The Elephant Man is based on the true story of Joseph Carey Merrick (1862 1890) (FISCHER 70), a terribly disfigured Englishman.
John Merrick (the Elephant Man’s name is John and not Joseph in the movie; he is played by John Hurt), the main attraction of a freak show, is discovered by Dr Frederick
Treves (Anthony Hopkins). At first only interested in the Elephant Man from the medical point of view, Treves finds out that Merrick can talk and read. Treves then tries to prove that despite the appalling deformation Merrick is a human being and not an animal. Eventually, he succeeds, and Merrick even becomes quite a well known personality in high society. The night he visits the theatre for the first time and is given a standing ovation by the audience when Mrs Kendal (Anne Bancroft), a famous actress who had visited him in hospital some time before, dedicates the play to him, John
Merrick, incurably ill, passes away in his sleep. He dies when he, deliberately and knowing that it will cause his death, lies down (normally he has to sleep sitting because the great weight of his head would cause suffocation) and sleeps at least once like other people.
Apart from the opening sequence, there are no surreal and confusing scenes in
The Elephant Man ; therefore, unlike in Eraserhead , the plot is perfectly understandable.
In comparison with Lynch’s debut, the movie is also much more mainstream, which is one of the reasons why it was nominated for an Academy Award in eight categories
(including Best Director). It won none, but the film made David Lynch an acclaimed director: “Almost overnight, The Elephant Man brought Lynch both recognition and respect” (HUGHES 42). The central motif, the conflict of an individual and society is, of course, very frequent in art, so it is not surprising that it is also present in Twin Peaks . In
13 the intricate plot of the series, many characters could be regarded as individuals struggling with society, even Laura Palmer. But that would probably be looking for a connection at any cost because neither the characters that shun society, such as the orchid grower Harold Smith, 9 who suffers from a phobia and never leaves his house, nor those that are really bizarre, such as the Log Lady, who carries a log and communicates with it, are similar to John Merrick.
Lynch’s first colour film, Dune (1984), was unsuccessful. But there is always a bright side, and in this case it was the collaboration with Kyle MacLachlan, a collaboration that would prove fruitful in Blue Velvet (he plays Jeffrey Beaumont) two years later and that would culminate in Twin Peaks (FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper) in
MacLachlan’s third leading role in Lynch’s third project in a row. Everett McGill, who plays another important Twin Peaks character, “Big” Ed Hurley, also worked for the first time with David Lynch in Dune . Apart from the two “Macs” there is not much good that Dune brought the director.
He accepted producer Dino de Laurentiis’s offer to adapt Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel for the film screen. The scheme was grandiose: “Number of production crew came to a total of 1,700. Dune required 80 sets built upon 16 sound stages. More than 6 years in the making, it required David Lynch’s work for three and a half years” (IMDB). The result, especially the financial aspect, was bitterly disappointing: “ Dune , which had reportedly cost around $52 million to make, grossed barely more than half that figure in the US: $27.4 million [...]” (HUGHES 68). In the film, the hero – Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), son of Duke Leto Atreides, who is killed by their arch enemies from the House of Harkonnen – becomes the long awaited
9 One of the people on Laura Palmer’s Meals on Wheels route. 14 saviour that unites the universe plagued by wars and feuds. 10 According to Robert
Fischer, the problems accompanying Dune include for instance the length (more than
600 pages) and complexity of the original, and thus the virtual impossibility of making a two to three hour film of it (FISCHER 90). Indeed, Lynch shot a lot more that was used in the final 137 minute version, but even that was not enough. The other problem
Fischer mentions is the competition of another space epic, George Lucas’s Star Wars
(FISCHER 100). It is ironic that David Lynch actually “turned down the chance to direct
Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi (1983) to direct Dune (1984)” (IMD B). To name at least some connection between Dune and Twin Peaks , both in Dune and Twin
Peaks dreams have the function of prophecies or visions (FISCHER 96 97). In both cases it is a character played by Kyle MacLachlan (as Paul Atreides and Dale Cooper).
And Kyle MacLachlan is the link between the filmmaker’s greatest failure and his greatest cinematic success because with the next motion picture Lynch’s luck changed. Blue Velvet (1986) is David Lynch’s decisive step towards directorial immortality and towards his position as a cult filmmaker. Blue Velvet stars Kyle
MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper. Jeffrey Beaumont
(MacLachlan) goes to the hospital to visit his father, who had a heart attack. On his way back he finds a human ear. Due to this he gradually enters the realm of crime and perverse sexuality – these are intertwined in Blue Velvet 11 – as well as love. Despite the happy ending, the film is very disturbing, and there is definitely a lot of room for psychoanalytical reading. However, we must keep in mind that David Lynch is as bizarre as his movies, and that with him it is never safe to guess when he is to be taken seriously and when not. Isabella Rossellini said that while she and Dennis Hopper were 10 This is, of course, grossly simplified. The plot is rather complex, but as Dune is neither Lynch’s masterpiece, nor is it of considerable relevance as far as Twin Peaks is concerned, I do not find it necessary to go into detail. 11 “Blue Velvet [...] established Lynch [...] as a chronicler of extreme emotions, often combining sex and violence in one disturbing, yet undeniably appealing package” (NEWMAN 539). 15 shooting probably the most terrifying scene in the movie, the rape scene in Dorothy
Vallens’s (Rossellini) flat, Lynch was laughing and had to try hard to control himself in order not to ruin the take (FISCHER 131). On the other hand, he is apparently serious about Sandy’s (Dern) naive and romantic dream about robins as messengers of love and peace (THOMPSON 118), which most viewers would interpret as mocking. In the same vein, many Twin Peaks fans enjoy what is most horrible in the series: “The fact that many people, including young women, were eager to wrap themselves in plastic to imitate the victim of sexual torture and murder suggested that they were not taking the
12 narrative very seriously” (THOMPSON 129).
Blue Velvet is also crucial because of the fact that it started Lynch’s co operation with the composer Angelo Badalamenti. His mellow and dreamy jazz tunes became associated with Lynch’s work, and Twin Peaks would be almost unthinkable without them; Badalamenti’s music helps the director create the kind of mood he wants. Starting with Blue Velvet , Badalamenti was a composer for all David Lynch films with the exception of the latest one, Inland Empire . Blue Velvet has much in common with Twin
Peaks : the motifs such as the dark side of a seemingly perfect and idyllic small town in the American Northwest, perversion, sex and violence, but also love and romance; Kyle
MacLachlan in the leading role; time period – Twin Peaks is Lynch’s first project after
Blue Velvet etc. For this reason I will analyze Blue Velvet in more detail in the third chapter.
The film brought David Lynch another nomination for the Best Director
Academy Award; Woody Allen, who was likewise nominated (for Hannah and Her
13 Sisters ) said that for him the movie of the year was Blue Velvet (FISCHER 131 132). In
June 2008 the AFI (the institution that helped Lynch at the beginning of his career)
12 Laura Palmer’s dead body is found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the pilot episode. 13 In the end they both lost to Platoon , Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War movie. 16 voted “America’s 10 Greatest Films in 10 Classic Genres.” Blue Velvet took eighth place in the category “Mystery.” In the television program “AFI’s 10 Top 10” broadcast on this occasion on 17 th June 2008 (on CBS), Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper talk about Blue Velvet and about David Lynch. This chapter is supposed to introduce the filmmaker (and above all the creative part of his personality), and Isabella Rossellini’s remark is very helpful in this respect. Besides, Rossellini was Lynch’s partner for five years, so she belongs to the people who know him best:
The controversy of the film, it was probably based on the fact that the film was,
is still today, very original. David Lynch is a very very original author. And he
does take you places where other filmmakers haven’t taken you. [...] Sometimes
the people that don’t like David Lynch, they say, ‘We don’t understand the film,
we don’t understand the narrative.’ But David is not interested in the regular
narrative that gives you the beginning, the middle and the end, where everything
is explained. Because he doesn’t tell you the rational story. He gives you the
emotional story or the story of the brain because the brain doesn’t remember or
is completely linear. The brain gives you a lot of images in your head, then we
sort of filter them, and we put into an order that we call rationality. And David is
not very interested in rationality. He just goes the moment before we have
filtered them through. And that’s what he’s illustrating. (AFI.COM , Rossellini)
Indeed, from his films it is clear that David Lynch is very interested in the subconscious, dreams etc. Dennis Hopper says on the same program: “[David] meditates during his lunch period, I mean he’s really into that. But this whole underworld of his, this subconscious world of his, is all coming from there” (AFI.COM ,
Hopper). Lynch is devoted to transcendental meditation, which he has been practising for more than thirty five years (ASTIC 11). He even engages in projects to promote it,
17 e.g. he tries to “help establish a network of so called ‘invincible universities’ to teach the philosophy of transcendental meditation” (TIME .COM , Purvis). He also set up The
David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace (Lynch:
“[W]e raise money to give meditation to any student or school. There is a huge waiting list.”) (THE NEW YORK TIMES , Solomon). Lynch explores the human mind, and the subconscious thoughts are crucial for his filmmaking.
And they are also instrumental in finding Laura Palmer’s murderer in the next step in David Lynch’s career: Twin Peaks . In the period after Blue Velvet , Lynch decided to create a television series. He teamed up with Mark Frost, a television screenwriter (e.g. Hill Street Blues ), and after three abandoned or refused projects, they came up with Twin Peaks (1990 1991). The series was a hit, but as the ratings dwindled, ABC decided to stop it after two seasons (30 episodes including two pilots).
However, its popularity was still quite large, and there were still many fans interested in the fate of the characters from the northwestern small town, and so David Lynch decided to return to Twin Peaks on film and shot Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
(1992). Quite surprisingly, the film does not continue where the series stopped, but it reveals what preceded Laura Palmer’s murder. I will write about the movie in the third chapter.
Lynch did not supervise the making of the entire series; he only directed the two pilots, the final episode and three other episodes. Simultaneously, Lynch was shooting
Wild at Heart (1990). The movie is based on a novel by Barry Gifford. Sailor (Nicolas
Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) are in love. At the very beginning, Sailor beats a man to death sent by Lula’s mother to kill him. When he is released on parole, he and Lula elope. Sailor wants to stay out of trouble, but he gets involved in a robbery and is arrested. Lula, who was pregnant when Sailor went to prison, gives birth to a boy. She
18 waits for Sailor all the time, and she picks him up when he comes out of prison. He does not want to ruin Lula’s and their son’s lives anymore, and so he walks away. However, a few minutes later he is attacked by a gang. When he is knocked unconscious, he sees the Good Witch (played by Sheryl Lee – Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks ), who tells him that Lula loves him despite all his shortcomings. Sailor catches up with Lula and sings her “Love Me Tender,” his favourite lovesong, which he only wants to sing to his wife.
Sailor wears a snakeskin jacket as a symbol of his individuality and his belief in personal freedom. He is an anachronistic character in a way: his style of dress is 1950s, and he likes 1950s hits. Evidently, Lynch is obsessed with the decade of his childhood; his films/series from the late 1980s and early 1990s – Blue Velvet , Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart – all contain allusions to the 1950s. 14 Wild at Heart deals with typical
‘Lynchian’ themes such as love and passion, sex and violence. As usual, it also features a number of freaks and bizarre characters like Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), a repulsive character with disgusting rotten teeth, who talks Sailor into the robbery, or Jack Nance in the role of a crackpot rocket scientist. Several times the Wicked Witch appears as an ill omen; the Good Witch, hovering in the air, opens Sailor’s eyes and brings the happy ending. These are rather hard to understand references to The Wizard of Oz , and they won David Lynch a witty nickname, “Wizard of Odd” (TIME .COM , Corliss). One of the most important symbols in the movie is fire. In Twin Peaks , fire is also a symbol of evil, but only now and then is it actually shown in the series; in Wild at Heart , on the contrary, flames are almost omnipresent (Lula’s father died in a fire – we see his death several times as various characters recollect it; there are close ups of lighting matches
14 Lynch’s fondness for the 1950s reached its peak with On the Air . Along with Twin Peaks , Lynch and Frost wrote this comedy series – Lynch also directed the first episode – about the crew of The Lester Guy Show , who face a lot of bad luck during a live television performance of the program in 1957. On the Air came ‘on the air’ in 1992, but it was not successful at all, and only three episodes out of seven were broadcast. 19 and cigarettes etc.). Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which crowned the most successful period in Lynch’s career.
I will only write briefly about Lynch’s work following Wild at Heart and Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk with Me . For two reasons: first, the films are made after Twin Peaks , which means they did not influence the series (and neither is the influence of the series upon them very remarkable); second, they are so abstract and intricate that the plot loses its importance to a great extent, and the focus shifts to individual scenes, images, sounds and the overall mood of the pieces.
Lost Highway (1997), written by David Lynch and Barry Gifford, is an excellent example of this fascinating complexity. Lynch tagged the movie as “A 21st Century
Noir Horror Film” (HUGHES 224). Fred (Bill Pullman), a saxophonist, apparently kills his wife (Patricia Arquette) but has a blackout and does not remember it. In prison he mysteriously turns into Pete (Balthasar Getty), a car mechanic, and we leave Fred’s world behind and step into Pete’s. We follow his affair with a blond version of Fred’s wife (which is perhaps the most apparent parallel with Twin Peaks ), 15 and then his transformation back to Fred somewhere in the desert. The link between the two worlds is a strange white faced man, probably more a supernatural spectre than a real person.
Apart from this very basic frame, there are many twists and turns. At the very end, the film completes a perfect cycle: the last scene is the first scene shown from a different perspective. The mysterious sentence, “Dick Laurent is dead,” is a little clearer now (the person appeared in the movie), but the fact that it is said by Fred into the intercom of his own house – and in the first scene it was himself who heard the sentence – is no less baffling. Lost Highway may be disappointing for those who want “the regular narrative”
15 “[...] Alice’s affair with Pete has striking parallels with auto mechanic James Hurley’s dalliance with Evelyn Marsh, a blonde married to a wealthy tug, in later episodes of Twin Peaks ” (HUGHES 213). 20 as Isabella Rossellini puts it, but it is captivating, impressive and absorbing for everyone who is willing to lose themselves in the eerie world of David Lynch.
As far as Mulholland Drive (2001) is concerned, there is no use trying to retell the plot here because it is even more complicated than Lost Highway . Although Lynch promised himself never to work for the small screen again, he nodded to an offer from
ABC to shoot another television series in 1998. The result was a pilot, which was not accepted. With the support of Canal+, Lynch was able to shoot an ending and turn the pilot into a self contained film. It was well received: Lynch won the award for Best
Director at the Cannes Film Festival 16 and was nominated for Best Director Oscar for the third time. Mulholland Drive is a showcase of Lynch’s soft spots. There is a complementary pair of female characters – one blond, one dark haired. In Mulholland
Drive the heroines are played by two actresses (Naomi Watts and Laura Harring), unlike Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks and Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway , who both play two characters with a different hair colour. There are references to the 1950s (e.g. in the movie the director played by Justin Theroux wants to make); there are diners; there is coffee; there are strange people (or coffee and strange people combined, such as the
Italian movie producer spitting coffee because he does not like the taste); there is amnesia (like in the cases of Nadine, Big Ed’s wife, in Twin Peaks and Fred in Lost
Highway ) and so on and so forth. Last but not least, there is a dwarf; what more, he is played by Michael J. Anderson, the same actor who appears in Twin Peaks as “The Man
From Another Place.” 17 Slavoj Žižek, who, by the way, mentions Dune , Blue Velvet ,
Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive in his amusing as well as intelligent document The
Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), claims that Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are 16 “Tied with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)” (IMD B). 17 A dancing dwarf dressed in red. In Mulholland Drive , there is also a cowboy, which may be an allusion to Lynch’s 1988 short TV film The Cowboy and the Frenchman , which was a part of Les Français vus par... , a series of short films by five directors (Comencini, Godard, Herzog, Lynch, Wajda) expressing their view of the French. 21 two versions of the same movie (FISCHER 348): it is true that the resemblances – sudden twists of identity, amnesia, pairs of heroes/heroines etc. – are conspicuous.
All the more surprising is the fact that these two ‘crazy’ movies are separated by an ‘insanely normal’ film, The Straight Story (1999). It is based on a true story of an old man called Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), who goes by tractor from Iowa to
Wisconsin to visit his brother (Harry Dean Stanton), who is ill and with whom he fell out some time ago. Actually, The Straight Story would be a common road movie if it were not for the John Deere lawn mower used instead of a car. But apart from this peculiarity (after all, who could expect something really ‘normal’ from David Lynch?), the style and the way the story is narrated fit the road movie genre. It is a wonderful coincidence that the name of the real life character was not changed to create the pun in the title, and that the protagonist of the only genuinely ‘straight’ (i.e. intelligible, following only one major plotline, giving up artistic pathos and concentrating on the narrative etc.) story directed by Lynch was indeed called Alvin Straight. I should only add that in the end Alvin Straight reaches his destination and is reconciled with his brother.
For the time being, the latest David Lynch film is Inland Empire (2006). Lynch decided to shoot it on digital videocamera Sony PD 150. He admitted that the quality was poor [in comparison with film], but he was contented because low image quality gives you more space for dreaming (FISCHER 382). If some of Lynch’s previous films are ‘weird,’ there is probably no word to describe Inland Empire . I heard it said that it is
“more ‘Lynchian’ than Lynch himself,” which perfectly captures the utmost level of desperation to which the filmmaker must have brought those cinéphiles who try hard to decipher his movies and dig up a more or less rational meaning in them. Lynch switches back and forth between several temporal and spatial planes, but these are so entangled
22 that it is often not quite clear where we are; there is practically no anchor. Besides, the individual planes are – quite unsurprisingly – complicated enough themselves. The film was partly shot in Poland, and there are many scenes in Polish as well as Polish actors such as Karolina Gruszka and Krzysztof Majchrzak. The leading roles are played by
Laura Dern and Justin Theroux. In addition to the complexity, Inland Empire is 180 minutes long, which may be too much even for die hard Lynch fans. But again, like in the cases of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive , if you have the patience to watch it, and if you are ready to focus on the atmosphere rather than the plot, you will encounter and enjoy typically ‘Lynchian’ elements.
This overview concentrates on Lynch’s feature films; it doesn’t list all his short films or all projects he has taken part in. For instance, from 1983 to 1992 The Angriest
Dog in the World , “a comic strip Lynch wrote and drew[,] ran in a few alternative press newspapers in larger cities, including the LA Reader . Each strip featured the same graphics, only the words changed” (LYNCH NET .COM ). There have been exhibitions of
Lynch’s paintings; he wrote lyrics for two Julee Cruise albums; he has also shot several commercials. Lately, Lynch has devoted himself to his paid access webpage
DavidLynch.com (launched in 2001: HUGHES 268), for which he created, for example, the “sitcom” Rabbits (2002) featuring people in rabbit costumes (two of them are the
Mulholland Drive heroines Naomi Watts and Laura Harring!) saying absurd things.
Parts of this sitcom are used in Inland Empire .
In conclusion, let me remind you of the most substantial links between David
Lynch’s other films and television works and Twin Peaks . First of all, Twin Peaks has a special status in Lynch’s filmography, as it is his only truly successful encounter with the television medium. Whoever is interested in David Lynch cannot ignore the series since it is an important milestone in his career and most probably – even though it is
23 rather early to say because no one knows what we can expect from David Lynch yet 18 – the pinnacle of it (along with Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart ), at least as far as popularity and fame is concerned. It also seems that Twin Peaks closed one chapter of Lynch’s filmmaking, as his favourite motifs of sex, love, violence and the hidden dark side of things were overshadowed by even more complex themes of identity, perception and memory in the later films Lost Highway , Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire .
Style, themes, actors and crew are obvious links. However, the most significant connection is the curious reciprocal relation: Twin Peaks is famous because of David
Lynch – David Lynch is famous because of Twin Peaks . Indeed, many people associate the director with the television series rather than with his work for the big screen; likewise I am certain that a lot of people who had not heard of a David Lynch before got to his films via Twin Peaks . And on the other hand, even though Twin Peaks is not only
Lynch’s creation, it was his renown (after Blue Velvet ) that excited the media so much.
A series by an unknown writer and director must be absolutely special to win half the publicity of a series by an auteur like David Lynch. This seems quite impossible to accomplish as long as there is a series that is made by an auteur and that is special and groundbreaking on top of that, which definitely is the case of Twin Peaks . But maybe the sentence should be rephrased: Twin Peaks is a revolutionary series by David Lynch, but it is also a revolutionary series because it is by David Lynch.
18 In the early 1990s, Kim Newman wrote: “Given one Lynch movie, it has been – until the slightly too self plagiaristic Wild at Heart – almost impossible to predict the next step” (NEWMAN 539). This is still true considering e.g. the succession Lost Highway – The Straight Story – Mulholland Drive . 24 02. Twin Peaks
In the first chapter, I wrote about David Lynch, the person usually regarded as the creator of Twin Peaks . This chapter deals with the series itself: it gives the most substantial facts about Twin Peaks , and it outlines the plot, the characters and the motifs, which are further factors that account for Twin Peaks’ position as a pioneering television classic.
One more thing should be made clear: technically speaking, there is a distinction between “series (a set of television programmes having the same characters and/or settings but with different stories) and serial (a television narrative presented in a number of separate instalments which may or may not reach a conclusion) form”
(MAZDON 9). According to this, Twin Peaks is a ‘serial,’ but I decided to use the term
‘series’ in this thesis, because it is a more general word, because Twin Peaks is commonly referred to as ‘series’ in most sources and because, anyway, these
“traditional distinctions [...] are broken down by contemporary programming (MAZDON
9).
General facts about Twin Peaks
In 1988, Creative Artists Agency’s Tony Krantz approached David Lynch and
Mark Frost with the idea of creating a television series for ABC (HUGHES 105). The two had been working together on unrealized projects Venus Descending (or Goddess ) – about the last days of Marilyn Monroe – and One Saliva Bubble – described by Lynch as “an out and out wacko dumb comedy [with] clichés one end to the other” (HUGHES
247). The first idea of a TV show, The Lemurians , was, according to Lynch, “based on the continent of Lemuria, which was fictitiously thought of as a very evil continent. It
25 was sunk before Atlantis even rose; sunk because they were so evil” (HUGHES 246).
Twin Peaks was the fourth (and at last successful) attempt of the duo Lynch/Frost to win financial means for the realization of the script. (FISCHER 148 150). The result was the series hailed as a milestone of TV production. The Web site Twin Peaks Online 19 gives several explanations as to why Twin Peaks was (and is) so popular and what is so special about it: “[ Twin Peaks ] is completely entertaining and engaging, filled with images, music, mood, and characters unlike any you’ve seen before (or since) on television. [...] Most early viewers were attracted by Lynch’s penchant for unusual themes in his films. Others were captivated by the visuals and the music. Many were fascinated with solving the Laura Palmer murder mystery” (TWIN PEAKS ONLINE ).
Twin Peaks ran on ABC from 1990 to 1991: the pilot episode was broadcast on
20 8th April 1990 with a remarkable audience share of 33% (HUGHES 118); the last episode ran on 10th June 1991 (IMD B). Thanks to the media hype, the first episodes of
Twin Peaks were followed by many viewers. However, the ratings gradually dropped, which led ABC to axe the series. A more or less exhaustive list of reasons why Twin
Peaks was cancelled and why its popularity did not last is again to be found on the Web site Twin Peaks Online : it was not possible to make the series live up to the high expectations of fans and media all the time; the plot was very complicated and missing only one single episode meant pretty much losing the thread (“[c]asual viewing was not supported”); “when ABC continued to move [Twin Peaks’] schedule around and put the show on hiatus during the second season, ratings continually declined;” it took seven months to disclose the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder (corresponding to a fortnight in Twin Peaks time), which was too long for many viewers; besides, when Laura
Palmer’s murderer was revealed, there was no other plotline strong enough to replace it; 19 Apparently, the Web site has not been updated for more than ten years now. Last David Lynch film it mentions is Lost Highway (1997). Nevertheless, it is a source of much useful information on Twin Peaks . 20 35 million viewers (FISCHER 157). 26 some people objected to the supernatural elements in the series, and some did not like the unconventional style, complaining that the show was “weird for weirdness sake” etc. (TWIN PEAKS ONLINE ). Despite all this, Twin Peaks became a cult TV series, and it had (and still has) a group of devoted fans. “Peakies” or “Peaks Freaks” (WILLIAMS 50) were outraged when the series was stopped. Their outcry resulted in Twin Peaks: Fire
Walk with Me (1992), Lynch’s prequel to the series, depicting what preceded Laura
Palmer’s murder. The movie will be discussed in the next chapter.
I should write at least a few words about Mark Frost, the man who created Twin
Peaks along with David Lynch. He was born in 1953, and before the collaboration with
Lynch, Frost worked (from 1982 to 1984) as a screenwriter for the highly regarded TV series Hill Street Blues (IMD B). His television experience was essential for the creation of Twin Peaks because it was very much thanks to the tension between Lynch’s cinematic view and Frost’s television approach that the series gained its final shape. The chemistry between Lynch and Frost worked – Frost said that it was like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn meeting (FISCHER 150); however, as Astic points out, it was not only the agreements but also the differences in their vision of the series that made Twin Peaks what it is (ASTIC 38 45). Mark Frost appears on Twin Peaks in a small role in the second season pilot episode [ep. 9] 21 as a news reporter talking about the Packard
Sawmill fire.
Auteur Theory vs. Collaborators (Why Lynch’s Twin Peaks ?)
It has already been said several times that most people associate Twin Peaks with David Lynch, disregarding all the collaborators, whose contributions were at some stages much more important than that of the director busy making Wild at Heart . I
21 As far as the numbers of the episodes are concerned, I count pilots as normal episodes, the first season pilot being ep. 1, the second season pilot ep. 9 (the episode following the pilot is ep. 2 etc.). 27 argue that however unfair the label “David Lynch’s Twin Peaks ” was and is to Mark
Frost and company, it has helped the series immensely in many respects. At the end of the first chapter, I referred to David Lynch as auteur . It is because he is a fine example of one according to the much disputed auteur theory (which is actually as controversial as Lynch himself). And it is not only due to the fact that the auteur theory appeared in
Lynch’s beloved decade, in the 1950s. This rather loose concept 22 developed in France around the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma .23 “The auteur policy postulates that one person, usually the director, has the artistic responsibility for a film and reveals a personal worldview through the tensions among style, theme, and the conditions of production. The net result is that films can be studied like novels or paintings – as clearly individual productions” (MONACO 422). Andrew Sarris, “the main exponent of the auteur policy in the U.S.” (MONACO 422), summarized it in 1962: “The three premises of the auteur theory may be visualized as three concentric circles: the outer circle as technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning” (SARRIS 538). Clearly, David Lynch meets the conditions to be called an auteur listed by Sarris – particularly the second premise, which presupposes “the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels” (SARRIS 537 538).
The obvious problem of the auteur theory is that it almost completely ignores the creative input of other members of the crew: screenwriters, directors of
22 “The auteur theory grew up rather haphazardly; it was never elaborated in programmatic terms, in a manifesto or collective statement” (WOLLEN 554). 23 “The ‘politique des auteurs’ (auteur policy) was first stated by François Truffaut [who would later become a famous director] in his article ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,’ which appeared in the January 1954 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma . It became the policy for that journal and was elaborated on by other writers, mainly André Bazin” (MONACO 422). 28 photography, music composers and even actors. However, most directors often work with the same people (Lynch is a good example again), which means the crew and very often the actors are an integral part of a director’s “personal style.” Another questionable point is that once an artist is labelled as auteur , all their films are regarded as important cinematic achievements (there is, as it were, no distinction between groundbreaking and mediocre movies), and there are plenty of other logical objections.
The auteur theory as a whole is probably faulty, 24 but it is not my point to judge it.
What I want to point out is that the idea of a sole genius behind a film (or a TV series like in the case of Twin Peaks ) penetrated the minds of both critics and fans: the proof of it is the fact that the word ‘ auteur ’ is now used in English for a filmmaker with a distinctive style. It is also corroborated by what Mark Frost, who co wrote Twin Peaks , once said: “There were times, when David was making Wild at Heart , when I was doing almost all the work on Twin Peaks . [...] But everybody wants to believe in the auteur theory, that it all somehow springs from one person, and David had a much higher profile” (HUGHES 107). For certain, if it had not been for the contribution of people like e.g. Mark Frost and Angelo Badalamenti, the face of Twin Peaks would be different.
So should we think of the series as “David Lynch’s Twin Peaks ,” after all?
Despite all the arguments against trying to find the one and only author and despite the unjust marginalizing of the other’s share in the final ‘look’ of Twin Peaks , I think that it really was Lynch’s touch what made Twin Peaks a notable television series popular up to the present day. Kyle MacLachlan (Special Agent Dale Cooper): “One of the more charming conflicts of Twin Peaks was when [David] came in to direct occasionally.
He’d throw out whatever script had been devised to move the story on, and do what he 24 Very convincing arguments against the theory are listed in the essay “Circles and Squares” by Pauline Kael, written in 1963 in direct response to the above quoted Sarris’s praise of the theory. Not only is Kael’s essay, which mocks both Sarris’s views and the would be clever language he uses, very amusing; her reasoning also completely shatters the auteur critics’ arguments, at least as they are presented by Sarris (KAEL 541 552). 29 felt like doing. And these amazing, mesmerising episodes that hardly related to anything that was going on around them would come out of that. The writers would be despairing” (HUGHES 134). MacLachlan’s words are evidence of both the importance of
Lynch’s artistic contribution and his role as the main authority. The natural conclusion would be that even if it is necessary to bear in mind Mark Frost and all the co writers and collaborators, significant and even crucial as they were, Twin Peaks is above all
Lynch’s creation. It is because what really makes the series novel and revolutionary is not only the story as such, 25 but also the emphasis on the visual and sound elements and the overall style, which Lynch brought with him from cinema and which are typically
‘Lynchian.’ (The style will be discussed in the next chapter.)
Plot
There are 28 Twin Peaks episodes, approximately 45 minutes each, and 2 pilots
[eps. 1 and 9] twice as long. Altogether it makes almost exactly one day, 24 hours, of footage. Clearly, there is no way to retell all the storylines or even the main story (as it is extremely intricate and actually merges with the other storylines) in a manner that is comprehensible and concise at once. I will try to extract the most important points in the development of the series, and I will go into more detail later in case it is necessary.
1. Laura Palmer Murder Mystery . One morning, a corpse of a young woman wrapped in plastic is found washed up on the shore of the lake in Twin Peaks, a logging town in Washington state. It turns out that it is Laura Palmer, a high school student and one of the most popular people in the town. On the same day, Ronette Pulaski, Laura’s colleague at the perfume counter at Horne’s Department Store, comes scantily clad,
25 Lynch and Frost set the main plotlines and characters, but a large part of the series was written by Harley Peyton and Robert Engels (FISCHER 154). The Internet Movie Database lists the writers (“Series Writing credits”) like this: Mark Frost (30 episodes), David Lynch (30), Harley Peyton (14), Robert Engels (10), Barry Pullman (5), Tricia Brock (2) and Scott Frost (2) (IMD B). 30 dirty and in severe shock from somewhere in the woods. These two horrifying events, that seem to be connected, upset the quiet small town. Because Ronette crossed the border with Canada, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is commissioned to investigate the crime. Laura’s double life is gradually being exposed: she was a drug user and indulged in sex. Using various ‘quirky’ techniques and relying heavily on his subconscious, dreams and visions, Cooper manages to identify the murderer as Laura’s father, Leland
Palmer, who was possessed by Bob (“Killer Bob”), an embodiment of evil, an entity from “Another Place.” When in custody, Bob, who has taken complete control of
Leland’s body, kills his ‘host’ by running repeatedly with the head against the metal door [ep. 17]. One of the crucial points comes at the very end of the first season [ep. 8, the scene continues in ep. 9], when Cooper is shot in his hotel room. Thanks to the bullet proof vest he is wearing at the time he is only injured and survives.
2. Special Agent Dale Cooper’s Investigation Methods . They are the hallmark of the series. These are featured in particular in the episodes directed by Lynch himself such as episode 3. Laura Palmer wrote in her diary about a person beginning with ‘J.’ A list of people beginning with ‘J’ is made. When the Sheriff reads a name, Cooper throws a rock at a bottle standing on a stump exactly sixty feet, six inches from him. He believes that if he hits the bottle, there is a connection (his assumption proves right in the end). Later in the episode, we follow Cooper’s dream, in which he visits the Red
Room. It is a room with red curtains all around, furnished with three armchairs, two lamps, a small table and a statue; the floor has a black and white zigzag pattern. There is a dwarf dressed in red and Laura Palmer. She tells agent Cooper who killed her, but
Cooper forgets it when he wakes up. In the second season pilot [ep. 9] (also directed by
Lynch), Cooper is visited by a giant when he lies on the floor after he has been shot.
31 The giant gives him several important clues. There are a few other instances of
Cooper’s cranky investigation methods, but those described above are the most striking.
3. Sheriff Harry S. Truman, the “Bookhouse Boys” and Drug Trafficking in
Twin Peaks . Sheriff Harry S. Truman, a square and honest man, leads a secret society fighting “a sort of evil out there” [ep. 4], meaning in the woods around Twin Peaks. In the series, the trouble the “Bookhouse Boys” (they meet in the bookhouse) deal with is drug trafficking: someone is smuggling drugs from Canada into Twin Peaks. Among the men belonging to the secret society are e.g. Deputy “Hawk” (a native American), the gas station owner “Big” Ed Hurley and his nephew James Hurley – a biker and Laura’s secret boyfriend. Agent Cooper is invited to become a member. The drug traffic network includes Laura’s ‘official’ boyfriend Bobby Briggs, who is the captain of the high school football team, his friend Mike, Leo Johnson – a truck driver and the husband of Bobby’s secret lover Shelly Johnson – and Jacques Renault, a bartender at the Roadhouse. In the end, Jacques is arrested (and later killed in hospital by Leland
Palmer, who thinks – apparently not knowing that he murdered his daughter himself – that Jacques is Laura’s killer), and Leo is comatose after he has been shot because of his involvement in another crime [ep. 8].
4. Benjamin Horne, Catherine Martell and Josie Packard . A complicated triangle. Ben Horne, 26 the owner of The Great Northern hotel and Horne’s Department
Store (and also, in secret, One Eyed Jacks, a brothel right across the border in Canada) has an affair with Catherine Martell. They prepare an insurance fraud and want to blame it on Jocelyn Packard, Catherine’s sister in law (her late brother’s wife) and the owner of the Packard Sawmill: they have the sawmill set on fire and want to make Josie look responsible for it. But Ben plays a double game: he and Josie take out a life insurance
26 Sheriff Truman says about him to Cooper: “Local big wig. Owns half the town” [ep. 1]. 32 policy on Catherine. Josie is supposed to get the money if Catherine dies. Catherine finds out. When the sawmill burns down [ep. 8], Catherine disappears. But she is not dead and reappears later [ep. 12] disguised as an Asian businessman to trick Ben Horne, which is one of the events leading to his insanity (see below). Later she reveals her real identity.
5. Donna Hayward, James Hurley and Maddy Ferguson . Another triangle, but this time not business but love and friendship are concerned. Donna, Laura’s best friend, was the only person to know about Laura’s and James’s secret relationship.
When Laura is dead, James and Donna start to go out, both saying that they actually liked each other all the time, but that it was taboo because of Laura. Their perfect relationship is slightly disturbed when Laura’s cousin Madeleine comes for the funeral.
James, Donna and Maddy become friends, and they try to look into Laura’s death on their own. Not only does Maddy look exactly like Laura with dark hair, she is also a very likeable, nice and sympathetic person. Donna starts to feel insecure and jealous, and it is not without reason because James does feel something for Maddy. But he loves
Donna and stays with her. When Maddy is about to leave Twin Peaks, she is killed by her uncle possessed by Bob [ep. 15].
These are the most substantial story arcs of the first half of the series. The second half, although remaining dramatic in some respects, lags behind the first one in others: aside from other things, the story arcs are shorter, sometimes completely independent of the main one and unfortunately also less gripping. I will only touch upon the most important ones.
6. Dale Cooper and Internal Affairs . When the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder is solved, and Agent Cooper is getting ready to leave Twin Peaks, Special Agent
Roger Hardy from Internal Affairs (“we’re the agents who watch the agents”) arrives
33 and suspends Cooper from the FBI because of his crossing into Canada and “the disturbing allegation as to [Cooper’s] motives and [his] methods” [ep. 18]. Indeed,
Cooper went to One Eyed Jacks twice: first time to lure Jacques Renault over the border back to the United States, where he could be arrested; second time to save Audrey
Horne (Ben Horne’s daughter) from kidnappers. The accusations that he stole the cocaine Canadian police used as a set up to catch Jacques Renault’s brother Jean (who is somehow connected with One Eyed Jacks and also with the kidnapping of Audrey
Horne), and that he is responsible for the death of three people 27 killed during the rescue of Audrey Horne prove to be wrong. It is also thanks to the help of the DEA agent sent to Twin Peaks to investigate Cooper’s case: Dennis Bryson (played by the future star of
The X Files , David Duchovny) and Cooper met before. On Bryson’s arrival, Cooper is astonished that Bryson is now a transvestite and prefers to be called Denise. After several digressions and complications, Cooper is acquitted. This arc serves above all as a pretext to hold Cooper in Twin Peaks and as a bridge to the next one, which is the main plotline of the second half of the series.
7. Dale Cooper, Annie Blackburn, Windom Earle, a Game of Chess and the
Black Lodge . After playing with the thought of Audrey Horne being in love with Agent
Cooper and him being charmed by this attractive high school student in the first half of the series, the writers decided to give the Special Agent a proper love relationship in the second. Annie Blackburn comes to Twin Peaks after several years living in a convent; she starts to work in the Double R diner, which is owned by her sister Norma Jennings.
She and Cooper fall in love. Long before Annie appears in the series, Cooper is informed that his former FBI partner Windom Earle, who has gone mad, escaped from the mental institution. Earle comes to Twin Peaks and leaves Cooper a message: he
27 Special Agent Roger Hardy: “So what we have is crossing jurisdictional borders, three dead bodies and international drug trafficking” [ep. 18]. 34 challenges him to a game of chess (the moves are to be announced in the ad section of newspapers). Whenever Earle takes a piece, he kills someone. 28 With the help of Pete
Martell (Catherine’s husband and the person who found Laura’s body), who is a brilliant chess player, Cooper tries to lose as few pieces as possible. But it is not
Windom Earle’s goal to amuse himself by killing people at random. What he really wants is to find the entrance to the Black Lodge, a mythical place of evil spirits, the opposite of the White Lodge. 29 The entrance is supposed to be somewhere in the woods around Twin Peaks. Earle manages to find out all he needs to know to get to the Black
Lodge. According to his plan, he kidnaps the winner of the Miss Twin Peaks Beauty
Pageant when he causes a black out during the ceremony, and runs away with her to the
Black Lodge. All the more reason for Agent Cooper to pursue him is that the winner is no other than Annie. Cooper follows Earle and Annie to the Black Lodge. A considerable part of the last episode [ep. 30] takes place in the Black Lodge, which turns out to be the Red Room (“Another Place”) from episode 3 and other similar looking rooms. ‘Lynchian’ indeed, enthralling and thrilling, the Black Lodge part of the last episode can be interpreted in many ways. What can be taken for granted is that
Windom Earle is killed by Bob, and Cooper and Annie manage to escape. But it is not as simple as it seems. The last scene of the whole series is as disappointing for the fans who like happy endings as it is fascinating for the rest. Cooper awakes in his hotel room watched by Sheriff Truman and Doctor Hayward (Donna’s father). He asks about Annie and learns from the Sheriff that she is in hospital. He says he needs to brush his teeth
28 A chess game in which lives are at stake is also played in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 classic The Seventh Seal . 29 Windom Earle: “For there’s another place, [the] opposite [of the White Lodge]. A place of almost unimaginable power, chock full of dark forces and vicious secrets. No prayers dare enter this frightful maw. Spirits there care not for good deeds or priestly invocations; they are as like to rip the flesh from your bone as greet you with a happy ‘Good day!’ And if harnessed, these spirits in this hidden land of unmuffled screams and broken hearts would offer up a power so vast that its bearer might reorder the earth itself to his liking! Now! This place I speak of is known as the Black Lodge. And I intend to find it” [ep. 27]. 35 and goes to the bathroom, but instead of brushing his teeth he squeezes the toothpaste into the washbasin. Then he looks into the mirror and hits it violently with his head. The mirror cracks and there is blood on Cooper’s forehead. In the mirror we see Bob’s reflection. Cooper grins and repeats the question “How’s Annie?” in a laughing fit.
8. James Hurley and a Femme Fatale . When Donna tells James that Maddy is dead, he is shocked. Blaming himself and Donna and thinking they could have helped her, he leaves on his motorbike [ep 17]. At a bar (a roadhouse), he meets a beautiful woman called Evelyn Marsh, who employs him as a car mechanic. Evelyn is married to a wealthy man, who is away most of the time and beats her when he is at home. She starts an affair with James, but she has another lover (Malcolm), with whom she plans to get rid of her husband. Malcolm arranges a car accident, and than he tries to make
Evelyn shoot James as if in self defence and frame him for her husband’s murder. But
Evelyn does not want to do it. When Malcolm wants to take the gun from her and kill
James himself, Evelyn shoots him (Malcolm) and breaks down [ep. 23]. Donna, who knows about Evelyn, forgives James. James says he cannot come back home right now and leaves, telling Donna he loves her and promising he will come back [ep. 24].
9. The Death of Jocelyn Packard .30 Sheriff Truman is in love with Josie Packard.
Their relationship is shown right in the pilot episode. Jocelyn is quite an elusive character. It comes out that she was involved in her husband’s boating accident. In later episodes, Andrew Packard suddenly appears alive. Due to this as well as the arrival of
Josie’s former lover and Andrew Packard’s business partner Thomas Eckhardt in Twin
Peaks (the three have some unfinished business, Eckhardt was probably behind Andrew
Packard’s accident etc.), Josie is immensely stressed. In the meantime, the investigation reveals that it was her who shot Agent Cooper and that she is also responsible for the 30 Sheriff Truman to Agent Cooper: “[Her husband] died in a boating accident last year. Andrew Packard practically built this town. Brought her over from Hong Kong six years ago. Left her everything, which didn’t exactly please his sister” [ep. 1]. 36 death of another man. Cooper bursts into Thomas Eckhardt’s suite in the Great Northern hotel seconds after Josie shot the businessman; they aim at each other. When Harry
Truman, the lawman in him fighting the lover, comes to the room aiming at Josie and telling her to put the gun down, Josie dies as a result of the strain she has been through lately and the fear of going to jail [ep. 24]. After her death, the Sheriff is absolutely desolate, but he pulls himself together eventually.
10. Ben Horne’s Insanity and Goodness . Ben’s unsuccessful business with
Catherine Martell and his arrest on suspicion of Laura Palmer’s murder have a bad effect on his mental health. He cracks up, thinks he is General Robert E. Lee and only gets better when he wins the re enacted Civil War he wages in his office with toy soldiers. Afterwards, he is changed. He feels compelled to do good and engages in ecological projects. He also wants to avoid lies, which leads to his telling Donna
Hayward that he is her biological father.
It is hard to pin down what makes the second half of Twin Peaks considered less interesting or even dull, but the difference becomes apparent during repeated watching.
While the first half is still captivating (largely thanks to the tense mood of unsolved
Laura Palmer’s mystery), the second loses much of its charm once we know how it ends. As if the second half was overcrowded with flat characters 31 – who were supposed to accomplish the impossible task to make up for the solved Laura Palmer mystery – and the plot too fantastic (even as opposed to the first half!). In other words, the mood created by Laura Palmer’s mystery vanishes when the killer is revealed, and the attempts to re create a similar atmosphere in the second half seem artificial and do not work. All in all, it is true what David Lynch says that the unmasking of Laura’s murderer “killed the thing” (THOMPSON 162).
31 Maybe even caricatures, e.g. the senile mayor and his young wife. 37 Characters
Apart from the intriguing plot, Twin Peaks is remarkable for its characters.
Psychology and development of characters had been common on TV long before the
Lynch/Frost series. However, what was new were the types of characters featured in
Twin Peaks . Many were unusual, two were exceptional. Ironically, the vital character of
Twin Peaks is the person whose actual presence is reduced to her corpse, a photograph, a short video footage, her voice imitated by a bird and very few shots when someone recalls something about her: Laura Palmer . Not only did Laura Palmer become the most important character associated with the series (matched perhaps only by Agent
Cooper, the actual hero of the series); she, and particularly her dead body wrapped in plastic, became a cultural icon.
At first, let us concentrate on her role in the series. Laura Palmer (played by
Sheryl Lee) was the homecoming queen, cheerleader and apparently, despite her young age, one of the best known residents of Twin Peaks, 32 also thanks to her many social activities such as helping with the Meals on Wheels, teaching English or ‘babysitting’
Benjamin Horne’s mentally retarded son. When she is found dead everyone is horrified.
As her murder is being investigated, Laura’s double life is gradually unveiled: kind, virtuous and great in every possible way in the day, debauched and wild in the night
(working as a prostitute at One Eyed Jacks, taking cocaine – for which she was fired from One Eyed Jacks after one weekend – etc.). In this she is a personification of Twin
Peaks as such: a seemingly nice and idyllic town, which, however, conceals all sorts of nasty secrets (see below in “Motifs and Themes”). It is uncanny how Lynch and Frost manage to keep the dead person ‘alive.’ Laura Palmer is everywhere. Clearly, we follow the investigation into her murder, and so it is obvious that she is talked about all the 32 When asked by Agent Cooper how well he knew Laura Palmer, Leo Johnson, the truck driver says: “I knew who she was, alright? Everybody did” [ep. 4]. (Later it turns out that he knew her better and even had sex with her.) 38 time. However, Laura is somehow more around and about than other victims of crimes investigated both on the big and the small screen. Almost everyone in Twin Peaks 33 was connected with Laura one way or another. And when the ways to keep Laura Palmer present start running out, Lynch and Frost bring on screen Laura’s dark haired reincarnation – her cousin Madeleine Ferguson (of course, played by Sheryl Lee as well). Maddy is what Laura only seems to be: good and innocent. She does not live in
Twin Peaks; she comes for Laura’s funeral and to visit her mourning aunt and uncle, a fatal visit as it turns out. The few days she spends in Twin Peaks, she lives in the shadow of her dead cousin. Her physical resemblance to Laura is more a disadvantage than an advantage to her, and it ultimately leads to her death at the hands of the personification of evil, Bob (possessing her uncle Leland Palmer’s body). The murder scene in the Palmers’ living room is the cruellest scene of the whole series both because of the violence in it and because we witness the killing of the nicest and purest Twin
Peaks character by sheer evil.
As has been written, Laura Palmer also became a cultural icon. It has been suggested that the character springs from the authors’ fascination with the 1950s and early 1960s icon Marilyn Monroe, about whom they wanted to make a film (HUGHES
115 116, 254). The image of a young woman, deadly blue and wrapped in plastic and yet beautiful, must have impressed many among the 33% of all US viewers watching the pilot episode on 8th April 1990 (HUGHES 118). She “fulfilled the darkest of
American dreams by living fast, dying young and leaving an exceptionally good looking corpse” (HUGHES 133). Nowadays, it is the representative image of the series as well as – thanks to this connection – a symbol of ‘art/quality television.’ The question
“Who killed Laura Palmer?” occupied the minds of many fans and was the tagline for
33 Actually, it would be more precise to say ‘all the Twin Peaks characters,’ as the population number of Twin Peaks is 51,201 according to the welcome sign in the opening credits. 39 the first half of the series until the murderer was revealed in episode 15. In 2008, the singer and pianist of the “punk cabaret” duo The Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer, made a pun on this line and titled her solo album “Who Killed Amanda Palmer.” A short paragraph on Time.com informing about Lynch’s “opening his Foundation for
Consciousness Based Education and World Peace” (in 2005) quotes Lynch’s words that
“It’s the home of total knowledge” and reacts to them: “And we thought we had total knowledge when we figured out who killed Laura Palmer” (TIME .COM , Winters). It is evident that the series and its netherworld heroine became a part of popular culture.
The other exceptional Twin Peaks character is Special Agent Dale Cooper
(Kyle MacLachlan). Agent Cooper is the actual protagonist of the series. He is an FBI detective, who was sent to Twin Peaks to look into Laura Palmer’s murder, and he stays in Twin Peaks even when the murder mystery has been solved (see above): there seems to be a magical connection between Twin Peaks and Agent Cooper; it is evident that it was some superior power that brought him there. Cooper belongs to the most charismatic characters in the history of television. He seems to know everything; he is calm and never loses his head. In addition to that, he is very humane and empathic. His enthusiasm and ability to enjoy simple things such as coffee and pies are amazing. All this is combined with the extraordinary investigation methods, which are effective on top of that. What is really charming about Agent Cooper is his unbelievable ability to make friends with everyone. He is very friendly and supportive; a person almost everyone would be pleased to meet in real life. Indeed, Cooper is an absolutely positive and completely flawless character. Most people do not realize that it is very difficult to create a character like that, and that Agent Cooper is one of Lynch’s and Frost’s major achievements. Why? Despite his perfection, he is plausible: you can actually imagine meeting a man like him in person. In genres in which plausibility is required, perfect
40 characters are very scarce because they would be nothing else than ridiculous caricatures. Usually, flawless characters can only be found in fairy tales, parodies and comedies. 34 Agent Cooper is not a ridiculous caricature; on the contrary, I believe he attracted many people to Twin Peaks . Cooper is also the spiritual element of the series.
Apart from him being exceptionally sensitive in parapsychological matters, he is a Tibet supporter: his interest in the country and its culture is talked about a few times in the series.
In the chapter devoted to media in James Monaco’s How to Read a Film , the author writes about television series:
“The significance of characters as opposed to plot, situation, or event is clear
even in the action shows, which are ostensibly devoted to event. The most
successful detective heroes of the seventies, for example, were Columbo (Peter
Falk), Kojak (Telly Savalas), and Jim Rockford (James Garner) of The Rockford
Files . It isn’t what these characters do that gets people to tune in week after
week, but what they are. Such extraordinarily quirky characters would be out of
place on the stage or in films, but they provide the quintessential television
experience. We tune in week after week to be with them because we know what
to expect.” (MONACO 392)
It was written at the very beginning of the 1980s, and it is still true (series like
House M.D. and Monk are perfect examples). On the one hand it confirms how essential it is to have attractive and peculiar characters in the series, on the other hand it shows that Twin Peaks was different: the authors combined the character oriented approach with the event oriented one (the latter is very common in soap operas; they concentrate on the plot, as soap opera characters are usually shallow). Agent Cooper certainly made 34 Ace Rimmer from the BBC comedy series Red Dwarf is a good example. This character only appears in several episodes; he is an immaculate another dimension version of one of the main characters, Arnold J. Rimmer. 41 people “tune in week after week;” however, Twin Peaks focuses equally on the plot as on the characters. Also, no one could possibly “know what to expect” from Agent
Cooper or anyone else in the course of the series.
The two exceptional figures, Laura Palmer and Special Agent Dale Cooper, are supported by a regiment of more common, but not in the least uninteresting characters. I shall very briefly write about those who appear in all 30 episodes. Sheriff Harry S.
Truman (Michael Ontkean) has all the qualities we would look for in a typical male hero: he is honest, decisive and active. He and Cooper become good friends. As opposed to the Sheriff, Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), Laura’s boyfriend, and
Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer), the hotelier, balance on the edge of the law, sometimes stepping very far into the world of crime (Bobby smuggles drugs, Ben goes as far as ordering murders). All they are interested in is their own profit, and they do not care much about what is moral. But there are more good men than villains in Twin
Peaks . Dr. Will Hayward (Warren Frost, the father of Twin Peaks’ author Mark Frost),
Donna’s father, is one of them. Another is James Hurley’s uncle Ed Hurley (Everett
McGill). Not even the fact he cheats on his wife spoils the good view of “Big” Ed because he tries really hard not to hurt her feelings and because the marriage was a hasty and foolish mistake he made after he parted from the love of his life, Norma
Jennings (Peggy Lipton), with whom he has the affair. Norma runs the Double R diner, where Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick) works as a waitress. Both Norma and Shelly have a husband with a criminal record 35 and an affair (Norma with Ed, Shelly with
Bobby Briggs). Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) is Laura’s best friend. When
Laura dies, Donna, in a way takes, over a part of her life. At first, she starts dating
35 Leo Johnson is the one who sets the sawmill on fire (for Ben Horne and Catherine Martell). Hank Jennings appears in the series later – he was in prison for homicide and he is released on parole. He works for Benjamin Horne and his brother Jerry, and it is him who shoots (but does not kill) Leo because the brothers want to get rid of him. 42 Laura’s boyfriend James. Later, in order to find out more about Laura’s life, she begins doing the Meals on Wheels in Laura’s place. And when Maddy appears as the personification of everything that was good and pure in Laura, Donna is, as it were, under the influence of her dead friend’s dark side: she starts to smoke and “she’s trying to act like all tough all of sudden” [James Hurley in ep. 11]. 36 After Maddy’s death,
Donna is herself again. Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) is Laura’s, Donna’s, James’s and Bobby’s schoolmate and Ben Horne’s daughter. She likes Agent Cooper, and he finds her charming too. For this reason – because she wants to help him with the investigation – she starts to work at One Eyed Jacks (under an assumed name Hester
Prynne; Cooper does not know about her plan). She is recognized by Ben Horne’s enemies, locked and drugged. Agent Cooper, Sheriff Truman and Deputy Hawk save her [ep. 13].
Like Hitchcock, Lynch also likes to have in his films women that correspond to the beauty ideal or that are somehow attractive, and this is also a noteworthy feature of
Twin Peaks : there are various types of heroines in the series (blonde like Laura and
Norma, dark haired such as Donna and Audrey and even Asiatic like Josie etc.), and they are all markedly beautiful. Whether this was a business calculation from Lynch and
Frost or it just expresses their admiration for female beauty, it is another reason to watch the series, at least for the male part of the audience.
Motifs and Themes
Twin Peaks was groundbreaking because it dealt with themes uncommon for prime time television. “Unquestionably, the seductively disturbing Red Room is a place where no prime time TV serial has gone before – or since” (WILLIAMS 38). Of course, 36 Laura’s influence is symbolized by her sunglasses. Maddy wears them for a while, after which she decides to get rid of her own terrible horn rimmed glasses. Then she gives the sunglasses to Donna, and it results in her “acting all tough.” The sunglasses are another instance of Laura Palmer’s being still present. 43 the Black Lodge and the whole dreamworld, world of mystery, other world, “Another
Place,” or whatever you decide to call it is the most obvious novelty on television, but is not the only one; and on the other hand, not everything shown on Twin Peaks is brand new. Quite the contrary: the series tackles many everyday topics frequently featured in countless soap operas and television melodramas. What makes Twin Peaks so special is not only the prominence of unusual motifs, but also the authors’ approach to down to earth ones and above all the mixing of the two.
The underlying theme of the series springs from Lynch’s fascination with the dark side of things lurking behind a flawless facade. A tranquil small town turns topsy turvy when a high school girl is found dead, and another comes wandering from the woods in a state of shock and lies comatose in hospital. As the investigation proceeds, we get to know the people in Twin Peaks; inch by inch it is revealed that things are much different from what they look like, and that there is a lot going on beneath the surface. This is also echoed in one of the most powerful catchphrases of the series: “The owls are not what they seem.” This phrase appears as late as in episode 9 (the second season pilot) and refers to the mysterious and supernatural occurrences in the series, but the idea of things being ‘not what they seem’ is generally more than common in Twin
Peaks . It goes hand in hand with secret . In the Red Room scene at the end of episode 3, the dwarf says of Laura Palmer (or her doppelgänger in the Red Room world) that “she is filled with secrets.” Once again, Laura Palmer stands here for the whole town. In the outline of the plot of Twin Peaks , ‘secret’ is one of the key words. There are secret lovers, secrets deals and contracts, secret societies. Laura’s double life is a secret, and
Laura also keeps a secret diary.
Another motif, which is very much related to secrets and dark sides and which is one of the central motifs in Twin Peaks , is crime . The whole series begins with a
44 murder; later there are other murders and attempted murders, arson, drug trafficking, kidnap, wife beating and all sorts of frauds. Although two of the leading characters,
Sheriff Truman and Agent Cooper, are men of the law, and although the frame story always follows some investigation or another (Laura Palmer’s death, Cooper’s alleged offences, murders committed by Windom Earle etc.), the function of many of the crimes is not to give the Sheriff and his men a case to solve, but rather to underline the fact that things are not what they seem, and that the calm, serenity and peace in Twin Peaks and the good heartedness of everyone living there are often only seeming.
Twin Peaks also deals with sex quite a lot; however, it is depicted in a very decent manner. 37 The series is not at all dirty; there are no explicit sex scenes and practically no screen nudity. Nevertheless, there is a brothel (One Eyed Jacks); many people have sexual affairs (mostly in secret, of course); Laura’s murder by “Killer
Bob”/Leland Palmer is sex related (he is driven by passion); moreover, Agent Bryson brings up cross dressing and transgender issues. Lynch and Frost even invented a sex magazine, Flesh World . Both Laura Palmer and Ronette Pulaski had an advertisement in it. In Twin Peaks – like in Blue Velvet , but on a much more limited scale – sex is sometimes connected with violence . Examples are Laura Palmer’s murder or Leo
Johnson’s beating his wife Shelly.
The authors did not content themselves with depicting hidden vices and dark sides; they decided to go further, and they addressed the principle behind these as well: evil . It is present, it threatens, it tempts, it seduces. And usually it wins. Whereas most
David Lynch films have a positive ending, the final Twin Peaks episode is a total disaster. Everything goes awry. Audrey Horne, Pete Martell and Andrew Packard die in
37 “The show also develops David Lynch’s insistent dark eroticism, though clearly going no further in its spectacles than could any regular prime time series” (WILLIAMS 39). 45 an explosion; 38 Ed Hurley’s wife Nadine awakes from her delusion that she is eighteen
– in which she has been living since her attempted suicide [ep. 8] – which thwarts Ed’s and Norma’s plans to be together at last; Doctor Hayward learns that Benjamin Horne told Donna who her biological father is, and in his fury he breaks Ben’s head (possibly even kills him) etc. All this would be insignificant if everything ended up well with
Cooper and Annie, but it does not, and it is the final blow to the good principles in Twin
Peaks , which lose most of the time anyway, when Agent Cooper, a good, honest and strong man, proves to be weaker than “Killer Bob,” the personification of evil. But I do not think that it is right to say that the series is about the fight between good and evil.
There are some hints to it, but Twin Peaks deals much more with evil and its manifestations in the world than with the actual struggle between the two principles.
Two of the characters connected with evil are introduced in episode 3. Cooper’s dream about the Red Room begins with a sequence in which we see two men called Mike and
Bob. 39 Mike recites a short poem: “Through the darkness of future past / The magician longs to see / One chance/chants 40 out between two worlds / Fire walk with me.” After that, Mike says that he and Bob “lived among the people.” Mike saw the face of God and cut off his arm with a devilish tattoo. Then, there is a cut to Bob; his last sentence is: “You may think I’ve gone insane, but I promise I will kill again!” Apparently, we only see part of Cooper’s dream; Cooper sums up Mike and Bob’s story in the following episode: “They had a tattoo ‘Fire Walk with Me.’ Mike couldn’t stand the killing anymore, so he cut off his arm. Bob vowed to kill again, so Mike shot him” [ep.
4]. Mike and Bob are souls or spirits; they have no flesh, but evidently, they are able to take control of bodies and minds of living people. Bob ‘invades’ Leland Palmer (and 38 It is not explicitly shown. However, the explosion is very strong, and only a miracle could save them from death. 39 Laura’s boyfriend Bobby and his best friend Mike have the same names. It is definitely not a coincidence; however, the link is not quite straightforward, and it would be a subject for a long debate. 40 This is unclear; sources differ. 46 Agent Cooper at the very end of the series); Mike lives in the body of a shoe salesman called Phillip Gerard, who also has only one arm. The real Gerard has to take drugs to suppress Mike. Although Bob and Mike already appear in the third episode, the theme of evil does not become crucial until the second half of Twin Peaks – until the arrival of
Windom Earle. It is also when the Black Lodge is brought into play. The Black Lodge is a mystical place where evil springs from. Deputy Hawk, a native American, says:
My people believe that the White Lodge is a place where the spirits that rule
man and nature here reside. [...] There is also a legend of a place called the
Black Lodge, the shadow self of the White Lodge. The legend says that every
spirit must pass through there on the way to perfection. There, you will meet
your own shadow self. My people call it ‘The Dweller on the Threshold.’ [...]
But it is said if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will
utterly annihilate your soul. 41 [ep. 19]
The entrance to the Black Lodge lies somewhere in the woods around Twin
Peaks (cf. plotline 7 above). It is almost certainly the main source of the troubles the
Bookhouse Boys fight against, and it caused the secret society to be created in the first place. Without knowing it, Sheriff Truman refers to the Black Lodge when he says:
“There’s a sort of evil out there. Something very very strange in these old woods” [ep.
4]. Evil in Twin Peaks is also associated with several symbols such as the sentence “Fire
Walk with Me,” owls and red curtains (like in the Black Lodge), but Twin Peaks symbolism is very complicated and vague (and most likely not very consistent or systematic), and it would be a topic for another work.
On the whole, the world of Twin Peaks is dark and bleak. If love is supposed to compensate for all the sad and tragic events of which the series is full, it is not very
41 A possible explanation for why Bob possesses Agent Cooper in the concluding episode. 47 successful. The only love relationship which ends happily is the one between Bobby
Briggs and Shelly Johnson. 42 Cooper and Annie seem to have a chance, but Copper is possessed by Bob in the last episode. Ed and Norma face a lot of troubles. Donna and
James love each other, but James feels disenchanted and leaves Twin Peaks for some time. And so on and so forth. In the series, love is a power which is able to defy evil (it prevents Evelyn from shooting James; it saves Annie from the Black Lodge etc.), but it succumbs to it in the end (the Sheriff’s love for Josie does not save her etc.). Lynch and
Frost concentrate on the dark side of things and, accordingly, they show the dark side of love – the difficulties, obstacles and sorrow. Maybe the only point which is always positive in Twin Peaks is friendship . There are many strong bonds between the characters: Donna and Laura, Sheriff Truman and Agent Cooper, Norma and Shelly and many others. Lovers and business partners may lie to and cheat on one another, but real friends (not business ‘friends’) never let each other down in Twin Peaks .
The last thing I want to write about is not really a motif or a theme; nonetheless, it is perhaps the feature that makes Twin Peaks what it is. The series is famous for its
‘quirkiness ,’ which can be attributed to uncanny and grotesque scenes, which are quite frequent. While for some people this is alluring, some find it annoying (“weird for weirdness sake”). There are two kinds of bizarre scenes. The first are dreamy, surreal and mysterious scenes related to the Black Lodge (“Another Place”) and all that goes with it. The best examples have been talked about already: Cooper’s dreams, his visit in the Black Lodge in the last episode etc. The second are scenes that happen in reality but are either bizarre or completely wacky and absurd. Just a few examples: the Horne brothers are talking when Leland Palmer bursts into the office singing the song “Mairzy
Doats” – the brothers stop talking and start to dance; Deputy Andy Brennan steps on a
42 Another one is the love between Deputy Andy Brennan and the Sheriff’s secretary Lucy Moran, but I did not include this plotline in the overview. 48 loose plank, it hits him in the nose, and he staggers around half stunned for some ninety seconds [both ep. 9]; when Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman go to the hospital to ask
Ronette Pulaski a few questions, they spend more than a minute adjusting chairs [ep.
10] etc. Not only scenes but also many characters are unusual. For example, the Log
Lady carries a log and communicates with it. The FBI agents who appear in Twin Peaks
(with the exception of Agent Hardy from Internal Affairs) are a showcase of peculiarities. Dale Cooper is a fine example. Albert Rosenfield, who is a top class pathologist, is cynical and sarcastic (Cooper: “Albert’s a forensics genius, [but] he’s lacking in some of the social niceties [ep. 3]). Their boss Gordon Cole (played by David
Lynch!) is deaf, wears an earpiece and talks very loud. Needless to say, the bizarre and grotesque elements are plentiful especially in episodes directed by David Lynch.
Topics and themes portrayed in Twin Peaks helped its popularity. They also hugely contributed to the originality of the series. They were either new and curious
(e.g. all the absurd, mysterious and supernatural features, such as the Red Room) or time tested and guaranteed (Lynch and Frost actually took the best of TV tradition – from both soap operas and television dramas – such as murders, intrigues and love affairs). This mixture of old and new was indeed revolutionary because due to unusual links and juxtapositions even the stock motifs were shown in a new light.
This chapter does not discuss Twin Peaks’ plot, characters and motifs in great detail; it gives just a basic overview, and it concentrates on the factors that helped Twin
Peaks to become an interesting and acknowledged television series. If I am to pinpoint those elements which make Twin Peaks groundbreaking and novel, they are unusual characters (led by Laura Palmer and Agent Cooper), uncommon and gloomy themes
49 (dead teenage girl, the dark side of a peaceful small town, secrets, evil) and, above all, the grotesque, absurd, mysterious and dreamy scenes. 43
43 It is no wonder that it was these scenes the creators of The Simpsons chose to parody on their show:
Let me remind you of a quotation I cited in the previous chapter. “[Twin Peaks ] is [...] filled with images, music, mood [...]. [Some fans] were captivated by the visuals and the music” (TWIN PEAKS ONLINE ). The focus on these elements is common in cinema, much less so on television. 44 Shooting a TV show, Lynch had to make a lot of compromises, but as a cinema director, he tried hard to bring as much from his filmmaking techniques as he could. This chapter is about the cinematic influences on
Twin Peaks . It deals with the film practices Lynch borrowed from cinema and used on the small screen, and it compares Twin Peaks (1990 1991) with Lynch’s films made in the same period: Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).
There is an obvious difference in style between Twin Peaks and series such as
Dynasty or Columbo . It is because neither soap operas nor television dramas gave much weight to the images, sounds and generally to style; they concentrated on story arcs. In this respect, Twin Peaks really helped change television, as it introduced many movie features that were rare on TV, e.g. various ‘artistic’ shots, 45 importance of music, emphasis on the overall atmosphere etc. Twin Peaks , supervised by David Lynch, is a half breed – actually more a long serialized movie than a proper television drama series.
“Lynch, an experimental filmmaker prior to Twin Peaks , shot this series like a feature
46 film, absent the typical three or four act TV structure” (GOMERY 331).
44 At least, it was not common in the early 1990s; the current situation will be mentioned in the next chapter. 45 E.g. shots from unusual perspectives, extreme close ups etc. Often, they are not necessary for the story as such, but they help set up a mood. 46 Madeline Dimaggio: “All one hour scripts are broken into four acts. Each act averages fourteen to fifteen pages. Each act in the hour episode is a separate unit with a crisis and climax all its own. Why? The commercial breaks are placed between acts. The most important act, and what the producers tag the 51 In November 2008, Lynch said in an interview: “There’s nothing like the big screen. The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience. [...] More and more people are seeing the films on computers – lousy sound, lousy picture – and they think they’ve seen the film, but they really haven’t (THE NEW YORK TIMES , Solomon).” It is quite surprising that someone with an attitude like this decided to leave the world of cinema for a while and try his luck in the realm of television. However, despite many disadvantages, there were also advantages: “[Lynch] hated the interruption of commercials every twelve minutes, resisted the 1:33 ratio with which he had to work, and – as a director committed to deploying powerful sound formations – had difficulties producing the haunting aural qualities he wanted, but [...] he was also surprised at the artistic freedom he was given”
(WILLIAMS 45). And it was largely thanks to this “artistic freedom” that Lynch was allowed and able to explore the medium and push the envelope of television series. In the previous chapter, I wrote about how Twin Peaks was innovative content wise; now I will focus on the form.
Sound
David Lynch films are famous for their precise work with sound (the quotation above mentions “powerful sound formations”). Randy Thom, a sound designer who worked with Lynch on Wild at Heart and who also participated in many other movies including Forrest Gump (IMD B), said: “David Lynch couldn’t make an uninteresting sound film if he tried. I find that visual artists, and that’s the background David Lynch comes from, often have a powerfully intuitive feeling for sound in their films” (THOM
11). But it is not possible to do everything on the small screen. An obvious limitation is
‘cliffhanger,’ happens at the end of act II because the break runs twice the length of the other commercials [...]” (THOMPSON 42). 52 the fact that sound systems in movie theatres are incomparably better than a normal television set speaker, which may be why Twin Peaks is not really rich in sound effects, or at least not considerably more than other television series.
What is special about Twin Peaks’ sound is the music, which is essential despite
(or maybe due to) the fact that, unlike other series (e.g. Miami Vice was famous for that in the 1980s), Twin Peaks does not use pop music songs, but only original music by
Angelo Badalamenti,47 whose collaboration with David Lynch began with Blue Velvet , and who composed music for all Lynch’s following movies with the exception of the latest one, Inland Empire . David Hughes made a comment on the music in Twin Peaks in his book The Complete Lynch : “[T]he Brooklyn born musician provided the title theme and incidental music for the entire series, largely composed of languorous melodies laid over disturbing, abstract underlying themes” (HUGHES 109). In the same paragraph he quotes Badalamenti himself, who said: “All the people are calling and saying, ‘The music is setting up so many of the moods, and the music makes you want to watch.’ I really don’t take the credit for that. I think it’s totally by accident” (HUGHES
109). By accident or not, the music in Twin Peaks is more central than in other Lynch films. Badalamenti’s dreamy jazz melodies – their literally ‘vibrating’ quality enhanced by a heavy use of tremolo effects – are not only used as “incidental music,” but also as music the Twin Peaks characters listen to. They play them on jukeboxes; they are on the radio etc. There is no music apart from these peculiar tunes, which, indeed, evokes the feeling that Twin Peaks is actually an isolated town; this, in turn, creates the characteristic mood, 48 which is one of Twin Peaks’ main attractions. Robert Fischer points out that making the soundtrack a substantial part of the series was completely 47 Now and then, songs by other artists are used, but they are definitely not ‘pop songs,’ but old evergreens such as “What a Wonderful World” [ep. 15] or “Pennsylvania 6 5000” [ep. 3]. 48 “The brooding synthesizer score and dreamy jazz interludes provided by composer Angelo Badalamenti [...] also greatly enhanced the series’ eerie, bizarre and melancholy atmosphere” (GOMERY 332). 53 49 atypical (FISCHER 221). Elsewhere, he observes that due to Badalamenti’s music Twin
Peaks actually resembles more the 1950s that the 1990s (FISCHER 16). Apart from the instrumental pieces, there are also a few songs, most of them are sung by Julee Cruise, who appears repeatedly in the series as a singer at the Roadhouse. All lyrics were written by David Lynch.
Image
In the early eighties, James Monaco wrote that “radio still serves as a model for television, a medium which, in contrast to film, puts more emphasis on the sound component than on the image” (MONACO 374 375), which is, among other things, due to the “poor quality of the televised image” (MONACO 381). He also says: “There is no particular need to watch a talk show or television news, and most television drama is generally comprehensible without visual input” (MONACO 375 376). Indeed, even Twin
Peaks , a series considered highly visual (at least in comparison with television production at that time), would be “comprehensible without visual input.” Not even
David Lynch could afford to fill the prime time TV series with ‘Lynchian’ shots 50 to the extent he did in his features, and he had to adjust his style to the television medium.
Nevertheless, Twin Peaks goes beyond ordinary soap opera and television drama shots, the function of which is simply to show what is going on in the story. As opposed to that, Lynch brings a bit of cinema on TV, which is one of the main reasons why Twin
Peaks is praised as an example of art television. 51
49 Fischer only mentions one instance prior to Twin Peaks : Jan Hammer’s disco music in Miami Vice (FISCHER 221). But obviously, the moods of the two series cannot be more different. 50 Shots typical of Lynch’s movies: e.g. shots which take a very long time, which are often only vaguely comprehensible as to their connection with the story etc. Usually, these shots could be described as ‘artistic.’ 51 “ABC hit its artistic apex with Twin Peaks ” (GOMERY 331). 54 With the exception of the debut ( Eraserhead ) and the prequel to the TV series
(Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me ), which are made in the ratio 1.37:1, David Lynch’s feature films are shot either in the 1.85:1 ratio ( Mulholland Drive , Inland Empire ) or in the widescreen format 2.35:1 ( The Elephant Man , Dune,52 Blue Velvet , Wild at Heart ,
Lost Highway , The Straight Story ); Twin Peaks was shot in the 1.33 ratio.53 This means that the action had to be ‘squeezed’ into a much narrower frame. But it did not discourage Lynch (and the other Twin Peaks directors, who followed his example) from quite frequently putting in shots of the scenery. Of course, the views of the landscape would be a lot more impressive in the widescreen format; however, Lynch did not give them up in the 1.33 ratio, as these shots are important even though they are not indispensable for the story as such. They are used to characterize the locale – quiet small town, set in beautiful environs – and to contrast it with the sinister things happening there. For instance, the opening credits, which contain many pleasant shots of places in and around Twin Peaks, do not warn the viewers that they are going to enter a world which is in fact bleak and a far cry from the peaceful imagery they see at the beginning. Also, images of woods surrounding the town are sometimes shown (usually duly accompanied by long and monotone low pitched synthesizer tones) to hint at the evil lurking there.
Close ups are also common in Twin Peaks . Not only close ups of people, which are routine in all narrative forms both on film and television, but also rather cinema like close shots of inanimate objects. Often, these mean a foreboding of something bad, but sometimes they are only used to make the mood slow, melancholy and mysterious. An example of the first one is when Cooper and Annie kiss over the counter at Double R, 52 The aspect ratio of Dune is actually 2.20:1. All the aspect ratio information is taken from The Internet Movie Database (IMD B). 53 This is called the “Academy aperture,” as it was standardized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. While it “was really only dominant for twenty years or so (until 1953), it was during this time that the television frame was standardized on this model” (MONACO 86). 55 and they upset a cup of coffee, which falls on the floor and breaks; we see an extreme close shot of the cup and drops of coffee dripping in slow motion [ep. 28]. The noted shots of traffic lights at night are an instance of the other function of the close ups of things.
Some of the crucial points in the plot are magnified by spotlight lighting.
Usually, it is connected with the mysterious other world: e.g. when Maddy is being murdered by “Killer Bob”/Leland Palmer, normal shots of Leland hitting her are intercut with slow motion spotlight shots of Bob [ep. 15]; when Josie dies, she and
Sheriff Truman sitting on the bed holding her dead body disappear, and Cooper sees
Bob crawl from under the spotlit bed; Bob disappears as well, and the “Man from
Another Place” (the dwarf) appears dancing on the bed [ep. 24]; when Annie tells Agent
Cooper, while they are dancing, that she decided to enter the Miss Twin Peaks contest, everything stops, and there is a close up of Cooper’s face in the spotlight; Cooper turns and sees the giant, in the spotlight again, who gesticulates wildly, shakes his head and mouths “no” 54 [ep. 28] etc. Both the last and the first example employ slow motion, which is another device used several times in the show to emphasize the importance of the moment.
Mood
Lynch’s movies may be sometimes difficult to understand or interpret in a conventional way, but there is one thing no one can deny the director: he is a master of inducing a certain mood. In comparison with really ‘Lynchian’ films like Eraserhead or
Inland Empire , Twin Peaks is completely straightforward. However, not even with the transition to the small screen did Lynch lose his sense of the overall mood: the slow and 54 By the way, it is quite strange that Cooper, who is normally extremely sensitive to these signs, does not comprehend this obvious hint and lets Annie enter the contest (which leads to her being kidnapped by Windom Earle: see the previous chapter). 56 melancholy atmosphere is an integral part of the show. Apart from the plot, the mood of
Twin Peaks is created by means of fine combination of images and music. Lynch is always very careful when it comes to choosing and creating the matching sound. He says that he is interested in the combination of sounds and moods, which is also because sound affects the subconscious; only the right image and the right sound together can create the longed for mood (FISCHER 282). Lynch often chooses the music before shooting, and he has the sound engineers play it to him in the headphones, so that he could listen to it on the set and see if it matches the dialogues (FISCHER 264).
Clearly, the mood is the key word in Lynch’s filmography. Eraserhead and even more Lost Highway , Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire with their nearly impenetrable storylines and hardly explicable twists are based almost entirely on the mood they create. I believe, the best way to watch these David Lynch films is not with a pen and a notepad, drawing diagrams, trying to figure out what leads to what and coming up with theories and interpretations, but to watch and listen, be absorbed by the mood, experience the individual scenes and put them in a mosaic; in the end, like with a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing, a kind of picture, a vague idea or a feeling about the movie is formed in your mind. Also movies with a clear plot such as The
Elephant Man and Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart rely heavily on their atmosphere, which is rather bleak in all these films.
Of course, Lynch knew the television medium would not enable him to work with mood in the way he did on film. He also knew a television series must be based on the plot (which must be more or less clear) and not on the atmosphere. With the help of
Mark Frost, an experienced TV staff writer, he succeeded in creating a series in which both the plot and the mood are in balance. Mark Frost: “Our disagreements would mostly revolve around the fact that I wished for more clarity and David wanted to draw
57 things out a little bit more. [...] I mean, I think if David had had his way, we might still not know who killed Laura Palmer...” (HUGHES 107).
Apparently, one of the things which attracted Lynch to working for television was the length of a television series story; however, as the following quotation shows, he was not interested in squeezing in as many plotlines and dialogues as possible but in inducing the mood he wanted. Lynch says: “Movies have time limits. To really linger over the detail of a crust of cherry pie, and really get into the saucer and the cup of coffee just as someone is talking about an affair – those are the things you can do in a soap opera. I think there are certain kinds of moods, especially in getting at the mood of a murder mystery, that take time to conjure up” (HUGHES 105). What is ironic about this statement is the fact that soap operas do not focus on the mood; they concentrate on the plot. Obviously, the plot has a lot of potential in this respect (e.g. death, crime and similar themes are not funny in soap operas; they make the atmosphere dreary enough even when they are not supported by artistic images and music), but the emphasis on the mood and the deliberate effort to set up certain a mood were something new.
One question remains. How is it possible that the images, sounds and moods are
‘Lynchian’ in the whole series while Lynch himself only directed a fifth of the episodes
(six out of thirty)? This can be answered by a parallel with Lynch turning down George
Lucas’s offer to direct the third part of Star Wars (he decided to direct Dune instead).
Lynch said that he did not accept the offer because he realized that Lucas’s projects are really Lucas’s, that Lucas had a vision of the movie in his head already, and that the film would look the same as it looks now even had Lynch directed it (FISCHER 84). The style of Twin Peaks was set by the pilot, which was directed by Lynch; moreover, the other Twin Peaks directors were chosen by him – they were people he knew, had
58 studied or worked with etc. (FISCHER 154 156). This is another and maybe the decisive argument for regarding Twin Peaks as predominantly Lynch’s creation.
The last factor I want to add to the list of things connecting Twin Peaks and cinema is the way Twin Peaks is supposed to be watched. I wrote in the second chapter that missing one single episode meant losing the thread. Indeed, the series required attentive watching, which is common on film but not quite so on television: “One had to watch – or tape – every Twin Peaks episode, or else become hopelessly confused.
Lynch created Twin Peaks to be viewed as a long motion picture, assuming each audience member had seen every prior episode” (GOMERY 331).
Blue Velvet
Considering all these arguments, it is no wonder that many people see the connection between Twin Peaks and cinema. In fact, the figure of David Lynch alone would be enough to justify it, but there is much more. Apart from what I discussed above – employing techniques which are much more common in cinema than on TV – the thematic relation between the series and Lynch’s films shot in the same period, and with Blue Velvet in particular, is evident.
Let me recap the plot of the Academy Award nominated movie in short. Jeffrey
Beaumont’s father has a heart attack. Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) visits him in the hospital. On the way back, he finds a cut off human ear and takes it to the police. The case is investigated by detective Williams, whose daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) Jeffrey begins to date. In the meantime, he tries to look into the crime himself, which brings him to a singer called Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). He sneaks into her apartment where he witnesses her being raped by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a perverted and violent thug, who kidnapped her husband (the ear was his) and her child.
59 Jeffrey is attracted to Dorothy, and they start a sexual affair. One evening, Frank and his cronies catch Jeffrey at Dorothy’s place; they take them for a ride, at the end of which
Frank beats Jeffrey up. Later, it turns out that Frank is in league with one of detective
Williams’s colleagues. Sandy and Jeffrey go together to a ball one night, and when they return, Dorothy waits in front of Jeffrey’s house naked and in a shock. Thus, Sandy learns about Jeffrey’s affair, but she forgives him. In the finale, Jeffrey shoots Frank in the forehead. The final sequence shows Jeffrey living happily with Sandy and Dorothy playing with her child.
Summarizing Blue Velvet like this, it does not seem that there are many similarities to Twin Peaks , but the opposite is true. “Several observers have suggested that Kyle MacLachlan’s Twin Peaks character felt like a grown up version of his Blue
Velvet persona, Jeffrey Beaumont. [...] Aside from the general feeling that Twin Peaks inhabits the same ‘strange world’ as Blue Velvet , there are numerous references and resemblances to Lynch’s earlier film: the robin which opens Twin Peaks recalls the closing image of Blue Velvet ; Ronette Pulaski’s shell shocked walk across the railway bridge recalls Dorothy’s after her own attack; [...] the red drapes in both the Red
Room/Black Lodge and the roadhouse, suggest the backdrop to Dorothy’s performance in the earlier film” (HUGHES 114). These are the most conspicuous resemblances. It is true that particularly the presence of Kyle MacLachlan in the leading roles (as Jeffrey
Beaumont and Agent Cooper) and the fact that both Lumberton and Twin Peaks are logging towns is striking. Also the contrast between the beautiful facade and the dark side of the two small towns is a crucial point in both the works. In Lexikon světového filmu , Klaus Bort writes about Blue Velvet that the film is about contrasts between the brightly lit world and its dark essence, day and night, good and evil, normality and
60 55 perversion, health and disease (BORT 277). This is true about Twin Peaks as well, only with the difference that the series has many more plotlines, which dilutes this focus on the duality.
The focus of Blue Velvet is not on the frame criminal story (cut off ear, kidnapped people), but on sexuality, violence and love. Psychoanalytical reading is the approach that suggests itself immediately. Twin Peaks cannot be so easily interpreted in this way, given that there are too many plotlines (a lot of them rather trivial), and that, although heavily influenced by cinema, Twin Peaks is a prime time television series after all, and as such it cannot be too explicit, which restricts the possibilities to tackle the Blue Velvet themes of suppressed sexual desires etc. Nonetheless, there are quite a few points which are common to the film and the television show.
Blue Velvet (as well as other Lynch’s movies) is commented on several times by the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek in his documentary The
Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (PG TC). For instance, Žižek remarks that Lynch’s films very often deal with paternal authority, and Blue Velvet is no exception; Žižek says that
Frank Booth is a substitute father figure for Jeffrey’s father, who is in hospital (PG TC).
In Twin Peaks , fathers are also a substantial issue: Laura Palmer’s father, possessed by
Bob, sleeps with his daughter and kills her brutally in the end; Donna Hayward’s father is not her biological father, as it is revealed in the last episodes; James Hurley’s father left when James was young, and so the substitute father figure is his uncle Ed, with whom James lives; Bobby Brigg’s father, major Briggs, has a secret job for the government, is interested in spiritual matters and can hardly be a more unlikely father of a high school football team captain; when Audrey Horne, who wants to help Agent
Cooper, gets a job at One Eyed Jacks, her father, who owns the brothel and does not
55 “Film vyrůstá právě z kontrastů jasně osvětleného vnějšího světa a temné podstaty, dne a noci, dobra a zla, normálního a perverzního, zdravého a nemocného” (BORT 277). 61 know that “the new girl” is his daughter (she is holding a mask), wants to have sex with her. All these examples are disturbing and traumatic in one way or another.
Blue Velvet is very much concerned with the link between sex and violence, which is a theme Lynch was apparently preoccupied with in the late 1980s and early
1990s. I have written that television limits the creators who want to deal with these matters; however, it does not mean that it is impossible. Lynch (and Frost) created a series which takes up this motif from his 1986 movie and introduces it to the small screen, naturally with necessary concessions to the medium. First of all, what is shown in Blue Velvet , can only be implied in Twin Peaks . Second, in Twin Peaks it is not the central theme like in Blue Velvet , but only one of the themes (which is again due to the variety of plotlines). And third, even when this theme becomes central, like in the case of Laura Palmer’s murder mystery, it is hidden behind other question such as ‘Who
Killed Laura Palmer?’.
From all the Twin Peaks plotlines, Laura Palmer’s death is the one most directly related to this motif. “Killer Bob” was so obsessed with her that he had to kill her when she resisted him. Earlier, on the night Laura died, she, Ronette Pulaski, Jacques Renault and Leo Johnson took part in a sexual orgy in Jacques’s log cabin; while having sex with Leo, Laura was tied, and Jacques’s myna bird called Waldo pecked her. In the violent scene in which Laura’s cousin Maddy is being killed by Leland Palmer/Bob, the murderer is overwhelmed by passion and desire, which is probably the motive for
Maddy’s murder (she looks exactly like Laura). There are also other instances: Josie shoots Thomas Eckhardt when they are together in bed; Jean Renault stabs Blackie, the madam at One Eyed Jacks, in the back while kissing her etc. Also domestic violence can be sex related, which is the case of Shelly Johnson, who is beaten by her husband
Leo when he finds out she has an affair.
62 In Blue Velvet , most of the sexual and violent scenes take place in Dorothy
Vallens’s flat. “Dorothy’s apartment is one of those hellish places which abound in
David Lynch’s films, places where all moral or social inhibitions seem to be suspended, where everything is possible: the lowest masochistic sex, obscenities. The deepest level of our desires that we are not even ready to admit to ourselves, we are confronted with them in such places” (PG TC). There is no such place in Twin Peaks , but the red colour, which is predominant in Dorothy’s apartment, is also predominant in Jacques Renault’s log cabin, One Eyed Jacks and, of course, the Red Room:56 the first two places are connected with sex directly; the third unites many more things, but sex as well because it is related to dreams and the subconscious (“the deepest level of our desires”), Bob
(who, in fact, embodies the connection between violence and sexual desire) etc.
The theme of sex and violence is also present in Wild at Heart , which Lynch made simultaneously with Twin Peaks . Sex and violence are united in the character of
Sailor, who has a very intensive sexual relationship with Lula and is also portrayed as aggressive: at the very beginning, he beats a man to death with his bare hands (the man was sent to kill him); later he gets into a fight at a concert. Later in the movie, there is also a scene, in which Lula’s mother’s boyfriend is killed. He is tied and gagged; his fear and the idea of killing gets the murderers, a man and a woman (there is also another man, but he leaves after a while), sexually excited. Last but not least for the connection between sex and violence, Lula was raped as a young girl.
Another taboo theme which is present in both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks is incest. However, the act is somehow twisted and, as it were, incomplete in both cases.
In the rape scene in Blue Velvet , Frank Booth calls Dorothy Vallens “mommy” during the ‘foreplay’ and refers to himself as “baby.” They swap roles just before the actual sex 56 The red colour is also predominant at the Roadhouse, but the connections with sex are very tenuous (e.g. Jacques Renault works there etc.). However, the connection with violence is much clearer: there is a big fight at the Roadhouse in the pilot episode. 63 part. When Dorothy lies on the floor, Frank says, “Daddy’s comin’ home.” Before he leaves, he calls her “baby.” The incest is only pretend. In Twin Peaks , on the other hand, the incest is real. Laura Palmer has sex with her father Leland Palmer (more than once).
The problem is that her father is possessed by “Killer Bob,” and so it is not really him who has sex with his daughter. Neither is Laura aware of the fact that Bob ‘inhabits’ her father. When she finds out, she decides to resist Bob, who kills her.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Leland being possessed by Bob, his incestuous relationship with his daughter, the last days of Laura’s life and her death are what the plot of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me revolves around. The motion picture has two storylines – or parts to be more precise because the second only starts when the first has ended. Elements from the first part appear in the second one, thus joining together the two parts, which are otherwise both geographically and temporally separated. A girl called Teresa Banks 57 is found dead (and wrapped in plastic for a change). We follow two FBI agents who investigate the case. This storyline ends when one of the agents disappears without a trace. Special
Agent Dale Cooper takes over the case. One year later in Twin Peaks, we experience events from the last days of Laura Palmer’s life, many of which are mentioned in the series. We witness Laura’s troubled relationship with Bobby, her secret and complicated love to James, her friendship with Donna (played not by Lara Flynn Boyle like in the series, but by Moira Kelly) and Harold Smith,58 her drug addiction, her wild sex life and, above all, the torment when she realizes who Bob is and her death, which in many ways was a redemption to her.
57 She is talked about in the series as the first victim of the same murderer who killed Laura Palmer. 58 An orchid grower, who is afraid to leave the house; he is on Laura’s Meals on Wheels route. 64 Making a film prequel to the series only confirmed Twin Peaks’ affiliation with cinema. For obvious reasons, it would be useless to make a list of common motifs in the series and its prequel since both deal more or less with the same things. I want to point out a few things concerning how the different medium affects the form: what is the same and what changes.
As I have written above, Twin Peaks was shot in the 1.33:1 ratio; Twin Peaks:
Fire Walk with Me was made in the ratio 1.37:1. This means that the movie frame was practically the same as the television frame, allowing no more possibilities for the mise en scène . The sound is not dramatically different either. Music – composed by Angelo
Badalamenti, of course – is maybe only slightly more significant in the film. What is different is the concentration of close ups of various things, long shots of the scenery and other favourite images of Lynch’s in the prequel. Twin Peaks contains these to a much greater extent that an average TV show, but if they were as frequent as in the movie, it might be a bit too much. It seems that Lynch enjoyed being free from the restrictions of television again and used the chance to put in the movie as many
‘Lynchian’ images as he pleased. The first scene makes it more than clear. “Famously
Lynch opens Fire Walk With Me with an extreme close up of a television tuned between channels, which is then smashed. TV is dead, long live cinema, the image seems to be saying” (WILLIAMS 53). However, it is noteworthy that many of the ‘Lynchian’ images are either taken from the series, or they are variations on images which appear in the series. Altogether, as far as the filmmaking technique is concerned, there are obviously considerable differences, but the cinematic influence on the series is all the more noticeable when we observe that much of the series’ imagery is used on the big screen
(which is much more demanding when it comes to images) as effectively as on the small one.
65 The basic difference between the TV show and the movie is the time each has to elaborate on ideas. Even though Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is not exactly short
(135 min.), it can hardly compare to Twin Peaks’ 24 hours. Kristin Thompson argues that “seriality marks a crucial difference between television and film” (THOMPSON 104).
First of all, there is less time for more plotlines in movies. This is perfectly illustrated by Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me when compared with the series. Out of the Twin
Peaks cast only a fraction appears in the film. Even characters such as Sheriff Truman,
Benjamin Horne or Pete Martell were crossed out. The movie only centres on the two storylines: investigation of Teresa Banks’s death and Laura Palmer’s last days. The series, on the contrary, continues on and on; it takes up new characters; abandons some of the old ones; it really “linger[s] over the detail of a crust of cherry pie,” as was
Lynch’s wish. But it is not only the amount of time that matters, but also the serialization as such. A movie is one continuous unit; a series consists of several episodes. While a film has one beginning and one ending, series have as many beginnings and endings as there are episodes. This gives the series format much greater narrative potential, as a series can work much more effectively with dangling causes 59 and cliffhangers (ending the episode – or interrupting it with a commercial break – in the most dramatic moment). Lynch and Frost (as well as the other Twin Peaks writers) work with these in a not quite traditional way: they are generally unwilling to close plotlines, and they add new twists instead. 60 The credit for this should probably be given mainly to David Lynch (remember the quotation by Mark Frost above). Thompson calls this coming up with new twists instead of closures “the violation of expectations concerning the nature of seriality” (THOMPSON 132 133). Talking about Twin Peaks’
59 The dangling cause: “information or action which leads to no effect or resolution until later in the film” (THOMPSON 21); in this case later in the series. 60 “Still, such story arcs, or threads that continue over more than one episode, present a source of potential complexity in a relatively simple format” (THOMPSON 59). 66 seriality, which definitely benefited from Mark Frost’s experience as a Hill Street Blues staff writer, I should add that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was not written by David
Lynch and Mark Frost, but by David Lynch and Robert Engels.
The movie was mauled (HUGHES 178 179). The main problem was, as Mary
Sweeney – the editor of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Lynch’s then partner – says, that the fans of the series “wanted it to be like the TV show, and it wasn’t”
(HUGHES 179). On the other hand, for people who are not familiar with the series, the film was “impenetrable” (HUGHES 178). All the more pity for Sheryl Lee, who was able to show her acting potential and play Laura Palmer, real and living, at last. “Sheryl Lee deserves an Oscar for her performance, but the film was critically trashed” (WILLIAMS
52).
In this chapter, I have sought to prove that Twin Peaks is considerably influenced by cinema. First, it is because of David Lynch’s name being associated with the series: “Yet however audacious [ Twin Peaks ] may have been as a televisual event, it is also haunted by cinema, largely because ever since it has been framed as a Lynch auteur work” (WILLIAMS 42). Second, the series makes use of filmmaking techniques which are more common to cinema than television. The stress on the mood of the piece is also unusual; the original music plays an important role in this respect; it is combined with images which are often very cinema like, more ambitious than routine television series shots. Both the music and the images support the plot of the series and create the gloomy, slow and melancholy atmosphere typical of Twin Peaks (and also of Lynch’s features!). Third, the relation to cinema is underlined by thematic similarities between
Twin Peaks and David Lynch’s film projects preceding, concurring and following the show. The obvious cinematic influences on Twin Peaks also contribute to its being
67 regarded as an example of quality TV because cinema is generally considered a higher art form than television. 61
61 “Some hold a lingering prejudice against taking television seriously as an art form” (THOMPSON 3). 68 04. Television and Media
I have so far outlined what was novel about Twin Peaks . Now, I will add a few points concerning the Lynch/Frost series. The last chapter touches upon three different things: the genre of Twin Peaks , its legacy, specifically its influence on three TV shows
(The X Files , Desperate Housewives and LOST ), and the role of the media in promoting the series.
Genre
One of the most striking and also one of the most attractive things about Twin
Peaks is the mixing of genres. The Web site Twin Peaks Online says that “the series defies simple description. Part murder mystery, part soap opera spoof, part comedy, part supernatural drama, and part homage to classic movies and other cultural icons
[...]”(TWIN PEAKS ONLINE ). John Alexander (cited in Thompson’s Storytelling in Film and Television ) wrote: “[ Twin Peaks ] succeeds because it encompasses all television: soap opera, melodrama, murder mystery, situation comedy, high school romance –
Twin Peaks is the unabridged collection of television clichés” (THOMPSON 161). Indeed,
Twin Peaks is a hybrid (ASTIC 24). It is almost impossible to decide whether it is a soap opera with a murder mystery in it or a murder mystery with features of a soap opera.
The absurd and grotesque scenes add the comedy element, and the Red Room/Black
Lodge, Bob and Mike, the dwarf and the giant and other mysterious and supernatural characters and places add something completely unusual. All this put together gives another reason why Twin Peaks is considered pioneering. From today’s point of view, when there are series such as LOST that combine mystery, science, psychological drama, philosophy and much more, Twin Peaks may not seem very special, but we
69 should not forget that it was the Lynch/Frost series that contributed very much to this practice of blending of genres. In fact, the practice is nowadays common to many TV shows. 62
In any case, Twin Peaks has much in common with soap opera. This connection is underlined by the presence of a soap in a soap: many Twin Peaks characters watch
Invitation to Love . This prototype of a cheaply made and naive soap opera with poor acting, 63 of which we only see short passages, has, maybe unintentionally, an important role: its deliberately blatant mediocrity sets Twin Peaks , itself a soap opera in many ways, apart from other soap operas and makes it look much more sophisticated. Twin
Peaks is also a whodunit, but the fact that it was Lynch’s intention never to unmask the murderer clearly shows that, at least originally, the murder mystery was only seemingly the core of the series. Its real purpose was to conjure up the mood Lynch wished for.
The focus on mood is very ‘Lynchian;’ it is common in David Lynch movies that the frame story is used as a mood inducing factor, while it leads to a cul de sac: the questions posed are not satisfactorily answered; the mysteries are not solved. 64 Lynch planned to do the same thing in Twin Peaks . He wanted to create a series that would go on forever. 65 In the end, he had to give this idea up under the pressure of ABC (and also
Mark Frost, the fans etc.) and make Twin Peaks a proper – if it is even possible to use this word – murder mystery with a proper finale, in which the murderer is identified and arrested. This brings us once again to the problem of the second half of Twin Peaks . The
“proper finale” was staged in episode 17 (the murderer was revealed to the viewers in
62 Detective stories, for instance, often go beyond crime solving: they often deal with the protagonists’ private lives (which form a story arc going on throughout the series), thus adopting soap opera features; or they try to explain the methods in detail (e.g. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation ), thus adding documentary/educational elements etc. 63 In its style it resembles Latin American telenovelas. 64 This is touched upon in the previous chapters. 65 “Woods reports that Lynch became hooked on soaps playing on the workplace TV whilst labouring as a printer in pre Eraserhead days, and fantasised about ‘a long running saga focused on one central locale’” (WILLIAMS 47). 70 episode 15; Twin Peaks has 30 episodes). All of a sudden, Twin Peaks lost its murder mystery label and was reduced to a kind of peculiar soap opera. Despite their effort in the last 13 episodes, the authors did not manage to restore the balance between the soap and the mystery part, which was one of the main attractions of the first half and, apparently, also accounted for Twin Peaks’ “cross gender appeal:” Linda Ruth Williams comments on another scholar’s remark that men concentrated on the murder mystery, while women were mainly interested in the friendship between Agent Cooper and
Sheriff Truman; she writes: “Female fans responded, in other words, as soap viewers, whilst male fans responded as thriller viewers” (WILLIAMS 50).
Legacy
In A History of Broadcasting in the United States , Douglas Gomery writes:
“Twin Peaks was an experiment, one that marked a historical moment in the era of cable and satellite TV” (GOMERY 333). All groundbreaking TV shows have an influence on the subsequent television production, and Twin Peaks is no exception. Here, I would like to mention three series, two of them currently running, which were either directly influenced by Twin Peaks or which resemble the series in one respect or another.
The X Files (1993-2002, Fox). The creator of The X Files , Chris Carter, was reportedly inspired by the plot of the second half of Twin Peaks (ASTIC 38) – by the very half which is denounced by most fans and critics. The similarities between the
Lynch/Frost series, especially its second half, and The X Files are apparent. It is above all the interest in supernatural and extraterrestrial powers, which is more focused on alien than on supernatural influences in The X Files , but also the FBI agents in the leading roles are common to Twin Peaks and The X Files . The most obvious link between the shows is clearly David Duchovny. The X Files male lead appeared in three
71 Twin Peaks episodes [eps. 19 21] as Dennis/Denise Bryson, a cross dressing DEA agent. Several other Twin Peaks actors made an appearance on The X Files .66 “The major reasons why [ Twin Peaks ] actors keep showing up on X Files are proximity and geography. X Files shoots in Vancouver; [ Twin Peaks ] was shot in Washington state, a mere stone’s throw away from Vancouver. They used the same pool of actors who live in that part of the world” (TWIN PEAKS ONLINE ).
Desperate Housewives (2004-present, ABC). Neither the fact that Desperate
Housewives run on the same network as Twin Peaks nor the presence of Kyle
MacLachlan, who, beginning with the second season, is one of the series’ stars, is the main connection between the two series. Much more essential is the basic premise that everyone hides a secret. The setting is not a small town but a suburb, namely a pleasant and tranquil street called Wisteria Lane. When one day a woman named Mary Alice
Young commits suicide, apparently without a reason, her four female friends set out to find out why. As they are not detectives but housewives, their ‘investigation’ 67 proceeds very slowly; the real focus of the series are the four women struggling with problems and secrets of their own. Like Laura Palmer, Mary Alice Young is present even after her death, but this time not only metaphorically, but also as the narrator, 68 whose short speeches introduce and conclude every episode, usually revealing important pieces of information (which serve as cliffhangers) at the end. Almost unbelievable is the fact that it was Sheryl Lee ( Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer) who “[w]as originally cast as Mary Alice
Young for the ABC series Desperate Housewives in its pilot episode, but was replaced by Brenda Strong” (IMD B). The form and the mood of the two series differ in many
66 They were e.g. Richard Beymer (Benjamin Horne), Michael Horse (Deputy Hawk), Don Davis (Major Briggs), Kenneth Welsh (Windom Earle) etc. (TWIN PEAKS ONLINE ). 67 They try to find out all the gossip they can; one of the heroines happens to visit the same psychologist as Mary Alice, and when he leaves for a while, she steals a cassette recorded by Mary Alice which she sees in the shelf etc. 68 Her voice; she only appears in person in a few flashbacks. 72 respects, but the idea of someone’s surprising and unexpected death exciting and upsetting the community and gradually leading to unearthing of dark secrets concealed behind an impeccable exterior is strongly reminiscent of Twin Peaks .
LOST (2004-present, ABC). Exactly like Desperate Housewives , LOST is an
ABC show which started in 2004 and which is currently in its fifth season. If The X
Files and Desperate Housewives resemble Twin Peaks thematically, LOST – aside from featuring supernatural elements (or will they be scientifically explained later?) and occasional artistic shots (flashbacks introduced by a close up of the person’s eye etc.) – brings the earlier series to mind especially as far as its reception is concerned. Even though Twin Peaks was not a direct inspiration for the series, LOST seems to take several steps further what Twin Peaks did 14 years ago: “ Twin Peaks was television which required a social context to establish itself as supremely ‘discussable’”
(WILLIAMS 52). “ LOST only begins with the 60 minutes you see on TV. Its mysteries, clues and literary historical allusions demand research, repeated viewing, freeze framing and endless online discussions” (TIME .COM , Poniewozik). In other words, both the series make their fans speculate and theorize. Not only LOST has been discussed online; there have been many Twin Peaks Internet forums as well (in spite of the fact that Twin Peaks was created long before the Internet became our everyday reality, which proves that the show is still very much ‘alive’). The difference is that whereas
Lynch and Frost most probably did not fill their series with deliberate hints and clues
(apparently, they did not know themselves where the story was going), the authors of
LOST intentionally created “the finest interactive game ever to appear in your living room once a week” (TIME .COM , Poniewozik). Nevertheless, the result – fans brooding about possible interpretations and looking for hidden meanings – is the same.
73 If we compare Twin Peaks with more recent television series, we must include another factor: technology has since developed. With home cinemas and digital television the picture and sound quality is very good, and the experience television audiences can have almost equals the experience of viewers in movie theatres. Viewers possessing a home cinema are still in a minority, but the potential urges networks and creators not to underestimate the visual and sound elements anymore, which leads to smoothing out differences between cinema and television. 69 Nowadays, it is not rare that TV shows are shot, at least a little, like movies, which is something Twin Peaks helped to pave the way for.
Media
Twin Peaks was innovative and groundbreaking in many respects, but it would not have been such a popular, well known and influential show if it had not been for the enormous publicity it received. In fact, the media hype was absolutely crucial. It does not matter how good or how special a TV show is, it can never become a major hit unless papers and magazines write and people talk about it. The Lynch/Frost series attracted considerable attention from the very start. It was very much thanks to Lynch’s participation, but as important as the participation itself was the ABC’s ability to ‘sell’ it and to advertise Twin Peaks as a revolutionary TV series. “Indeed, even before Twin
Peaks was broadcast, the press was championing the series as a television milestone. As early as September 1989, Connoisseur magazine published a TV special, describing
Twin Peaks as ‘The Series That Will Change TV’” (HUGHES 117). In an article entitled
“Like Nothing on Earth” published in the Time magazine on 9th April 1990 (the day
69 There are still considerable differences, but it is true that there is no longer a clear distinction between film and video/TV, as James Monaco argued already in the early 1980s: “Now, they must be regarded as parts of the same continuum” (MONACO 302). Today, the borderlines are even more blurred, with many filmmakers shooting on video (e.g. Lynch and Inland Empire ) etc. 74 after the pilot was broadcast), the authors reviewed the pilot episode: “ Twin Peaks , which debuts Sunday as a two hour movie, is like nothing you’ve seen in prime time – or on God’s earth. It may be the most hauntingly original work ever done for American
TV” (TIME .COM , Worrell and Zoglin). Not only did Twin Peaks become popular and fashionable with the ‘ordinary’ audience; the label ‘art television’ brought intellectuals and would be intellectuals, who would normally have resisted a popular craze, to their
TV sets.
Both the network and national critics aggressively publicized the show as an
unprecedented form of television drama, one that exemplified the network era
while also exploring a tone considerably more sinister than previously seen in
the medium. In other words, critics promoted the series as a rare example of
television ‘art,’ a program that publicists predicted would attract a more upscale,
sophisticated, and demographically desirable audience to television. (GOMERY
331)
It was the media that made Twin Peaks a megahit, and also, to a great extent, it was the media that accounted for Twin Peaks’ decline:
ABC hyped the series for months in advance of its premiere, and, despite being
the darling of the critics and media, there was no way it could sustain such high
interest. Many people watched [ Twin Peaks ] because ‘everyone’ was talking
about it and they wanted to be ‘in’. These viewers abandoned it as soon as it lost
its cachet, because they didn’t find it inherently interesting. Meteoric rises in
popularity are frequently followed by just as meteoric descents. (TWIN PEAKS
ONLINE )
This is confirmed by Hughes: “By the end of the first series – which frustrated some and infuriated others, by refusing to reveal who killed Laura Palmer – and the
75 beginning of the second, a backlash began, with many critics damning the series they had once praised to the skies” (HUGHES 117). Media also played a vital part in Twin
Peaks’ transcending the world of television. Like many fads, Twin Peaks and everything connected with it became an important part of popular culture for some time.
Lynch appeared on the cover of the Time magazine on 1st October 1990, a day after
Twin Peaks’ second season pilot was aired. The title read, “David Lynch: Wild at Art
Genius Behind Twin Peaks ” (TIME .COM , “David Lynch – Oct. 1, 1990”). In the same month, “[i]n October 1990, Sherilyn Fenn, Mädchen Amick and Lara Flynn Boyle were the first non musicians to make the cover of Rolling Stone magazine” (IMD B). When the ratings started to decrease, so did the interest of the media. Nevertheless, some of the images associated with the series – the corpse of a beautiful teenage girl wrapped in plastic, the Red Room with its zigzag floor, red drapes and backtalk or the slicked back haired FBI agent confiding almost all his thoughts to a Dictaphone, beginning every record by addressing his assistant (or whoever) called Diane 70 etc. – still remain well known cultural symbols, something that people recognize.
70 Diane never appears in the series, and she is not mentioned by anyone else except for Cooper. Supposing she really works at the FBI, the question arises as to how Cooper sends her the cassettes. Diane might as well be just a fictitious person – a name for Cooper’s diary or something of that sort, in fact. 76 Conclusion
The goal of this thesis was to present the factors that account for Twin Peaks’ being considered a revolutionary television series. Now, let me summarize the most important points once again.
One of the crucial reasons why Twin Peaks received so much attention was
David Lynch’s participation. He was (and still is) peculiar and original enough as a cinema director, so his shooting a television series excited and surprised many people, as the television rules are much stricter than in cinema, network televisions depend on ratings and cannot afford avant garde experiments etc.
The excitement about Lynch working for television goes hand in hand with the media hype that surrounded Twin Peaks even before it was broadcast, which, of course, attracted many viewers and made the series a vogue.
But this would not have worked if the series had not been interesting in itself.
Twin Peaks brought many cinematic elements to the small screen: the images and music play a more significant role than in other TV shows; also the stress on the mood was unusual. In many respects, Twin Peaks is more like a film than a television series.
Apart from that, Twin Peaks is also peculiar as far as its plot is concerned. The murder mystery and the question ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ haunted many of the series’ fans; Twin Peaks features many curious, even grotesque characters; it deals with themes (some of them are very ‘Lynchian’) not exactly common on television at that time such as dreams, the subconscious, sex, violence, evil, secrets and especially the dark side of people and things. Undeniably, the hallmark of the series is Agent Cooper, his uncanny investigation methods and the mysterious Red Room/Black Lodge world, to which these methods bring him.
77 Last but not least, the fact that Twin Peaks combines soap opera, mystery drama and elements from various television and film genres makes the series remarkable.
Twin Peaks is one of the instances of ‘quality’ or ‘art’ television (television that tries to go beyond mass production and focuses on artistic and aesthetic qualities as well), and as such it helped prove that television may be an artistic medium in its own right.
78 Bibliography
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The Elephant Man. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne
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Dune. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Francesca Annis, Kyle MacLachlan, Sting, Max von
Sydow, Jose Ferrer. De Laurentiis, 1984.
81 Blue Velvet. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis
Hopper, Laura Dern. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986.
Wild at Heart. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe.
PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 1990.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Sheryl Lee, Moira Kelly, Ray
Wise, Dana Ashbrook. CiBy 2000, 1992.
Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty.
October Films, 1997.
The Straight Story. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry
Dean Stanton. Asymmetrical Productions, 1999.
Inland Empire. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons,
Karolina Gruszka, Jan Hencz, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Grace Zabriskie.
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